As part of its $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint, IBM has announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Germany. Located in Frankfurt, the new facility provides customers with a local cloud center to help them meet Germany’s strict security and data privacy regulations, improving application performance by lowering latency for local customers.
The Frankfurt cloud center follows SoftLayer’s standardized pod design, having the capacity for thousands of physical dedicated servers and offering the full range of cloud infrastructure services, including SoftLayer’s bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking.
Via the company’s private network, the new facility in Frankfurt would seamlessly integrate with all SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) around the world. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, clients can create their customer-specific public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.
Amsterdam, London, Paris
“Data privacy regulations in the European Union (EU) are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”
Germany would consistently rank within IBM Cloud’s top five best-performing EMEA countries in terms of total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth. German customers using IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure include those in the gaming, digital marketing and advertising, and online and IT services businesses.
The Frankfurt facility complements existing European IBM Cloud facilities in Amsterdam, London, and Paris and broadens redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world by enabling backups that can be replicated and integrated in any other SoftLayer cloud data center, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.
