Toward the end of April, SoftLayer, a managed hosting and cloud provider owned by IBM, announced the opening of its newest Netherlands data center in Almere. The facility, situated just outside of Amsterdam, is the company's second data center in the region.
The new Almere data center will help SoftLayer expand its presence in the area, and will serve to support IBM's goal of doubling the company's service footprint in the country. The Netherlands data center will offer a range of benefits for clients in the region, including access to redundant data storage and geographically isolated services, which can prove advantageous for customers' business continuity and recovery strategies.
The new facility is the most recent opening that comes as part of IBM's plans to build 15 new data centers across the globe. Since that 2014 announcement, the company has established 13 new facilities, including two Netherlands data centers. Both structures boast a capacity of 8,000 servers, similar to the configuration of SoftLayer's Frankfurt data center, London data center and Paris data center.
Support for IBM and its partners
The company noted that its expanded presence will help ensure that customers in the area have options when it comes to cloud, backup and disaster recovery services.
"This new facility demonstrates the demand and success IBM Cloud is having at delivering high-value services right to the doorstep of our clients," said James Comfort, IBM cloud services general manager. "We're reaching customers in a way that takes all of the guesswork out of moving to the cloud. They can build and scale applications, run the toughest big data workloads and have the level of security they need, all in-country and connected to a truly global platform."
The Netherlands data center will also serve to support KPN, a Dutch IT and telecommunications provider that is a partner of IBM. KPN will utilize the Almere data center to provide cloud services for more than one million small to large organizations in the country.
"With our partnership with SoftLayer, our end users will be able to take advantage of cloud services that not only meet their in-country data residency requirements, but will also offer a choice between three IaaS options: bare metal servers, single-tenant and multi-tenant virtual machines, for most optimized performance, security, scalability and manageability."
This region has been attracting a considerable amount of data center activity lately, including Apple's plans for a new Ireland data center and Denmark data center, as well as Amazon's new Germany data center.
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