IBM announced in late December that it has opened its first Japanese Softlayer facility with a Tokyo data center.
The site will serve to complement Softlayer resources in other Asia-Pacific locations, including Singapore and Hong Kong. The new construction will also broaden options for data redundancy and geographic diversity within IBM’s growing worldwide data center network. The Tokyo data center offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, as well as latency from the Hong Kong data center of less than 50 milliseconds and less than 270 milliseconds from other global SoftLayer facilities.
Creating a Japan data center also offers Big Blue the opportunity to address growing concerns about data residency and privacy by providing a local facility for its local clientele to store and compute privileged data that has to remain inside the country.
“Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world.”
The Japan data center offers capacity for thousands of physical servers and will integrate SoftLayer’s private network with all of the company’s other cloud data centers and points of presence around the world.
The company chose an ideal time to open a Tokyo data center, as IBM’s Japanese cloud customers increased more than 600 percent since the third quarter of 2013. Japanese customers using SoftLayer’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering now total more than a thousand.
Along with the Japan data center, IBM also recently opened SoftLayer facilities in two other countries, including a Melbourne data center and a Paris data center. The new sites are all part of a larger $1.2 billion investment to expand the company’s global cloud portfolio.
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