IBM announced in August that they had opened a new Toronto data center, the first SoftLayer facility in Canada.
The Toronto facility is the fifth of 15 new data centers IBM plans to open this year, including the recently opened Hong Kong data center and London data center. These centers are all a part of the company’s $1.2 billion overall investment in cloud computing.
SoftLayer already has a customer base for Canada data centers of more than 1,000 businesses and the new Toronto data center offers these clients local cloud services that provide bare metal and virtual servers as well as storage and network access in a single, integrated platform.
“Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, and a vital financial and technological hub—not only for the province of Ontario but for all of Canada,” SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby said in a statement. “We have hundreds of existing Canadian customers that can now have SoftLayer services deployed closer to home, and thousands of customers that will take advantage of the facility to get closer to end users in this market.”
Opening a Toronto data center also allows SoftLayer to comply with Canadian data residency laws that require financial institutions, public-sector organizations and other large enterprises to house data within the country. The new facility is being built to support more than 15,000 physical servers and will have access to SoftLayer’s global network via a point of presence in Toronto. It will also be built on a Performance Optimized Data Center concept.
IBM acquired SoftLayer for approximately $2 billion in 2013 and since then the company has played an essential role in propelling services focused on the development of expanding IBM’s marketplace of partners, software-defined storage and the Watson platform.
The Toronto data center has already begun taking orders and delivering services to Canadian customers.
