Melbourne Data Center Opening Announced by SoftLayer

IBM company SoftLayer announced it will be opening its first Australia data center this September. The $35 million Melbourne facility will be located in the city’s Deer Park neighborhood and is part of a wider IBM investment to extend its cloud services across the globe. The company is on track to open 15 new data centers this year in a $1.2 billion investment.

Even before a Melbourne data center was announced, Australia has been a profitable market for SoftLayer, providing 5 percent of the company’s revenues. The new facility will meet the demands of Australian organizations for secure, in-country cloud services that can be delivered as part of public, private or hybrid environments. The data center will have the first set of 5,000 physical servers turned on in September, eventually raising capacity to more than 15,000 servers over the next three years.

“Australia is an important market for IBM and SoftLayer. We are seeing a strong appetite for cloud in this market, particularly towards the hybrid cloud model,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. “We are investing in Australia, combining and strengthening our existing cloud capabilities. IBM’s ability to offer Australian businesses in-country access to SoftLayer’s global cloud infrastructure will further accelerate cloud adoption amongst a new breed of organizations that is constantly ready and responding to change.”

SoftLayer is also planning a second Australian facility, with a Sydney data center opening in the second half of 2014. This will make Australia the only country other than the U.S. to have multiple SoftLayer facilities. Both the Melbourne and Sydney data centers will offer the company’s full array of cloud services, including storage, networking and bare metal and virtual servers in a single, integrated platform.