IBM announced in early January that it is continuing its global cloud services expansion by opening a Germany data center.
The Frankfurt data center is the company's first SoftLayer facility in the country and is part of an overall $1.2 billion investment by IBM to widen the reach of its cloud network. The new facility will provide support to other SoftLayer sites in Europe, including a London data center, Paris data center and Amsterdam data center. The site's location in Germany allows IBM to provide businesses in the area with a local facility that meets strict German and European security and data privacy standards.
"Data privacy regulations in the European Union are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies," said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. "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."
The Frankfurt data center offers customers a 10? Gbps connection to SoftLayer services and only 7 milliseconds of latency from the company's Amsterdam data center. Connections to other SoftLayer facilities around the world can be made with just 330 milliseconds of latency.
The facility utilizes a modular data center design, with each pod having the capacity for thousands of physical servers. A full range of cloud infrastructure services are offered in the Germany data center, including SoftLayer's bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking.
IBM and SoftLayer chose an ideal time to open their Germany data center, as cloud adoption in the country is growing rapidly. A recent study by the Experton Group found that the number of German companies deploying cloud services increased 32 percent between 2012 and 2013, and the cloud market in Germany is expected to have a value of more than $21 billion by 2017. Germany is consistently within IBM Cloud's top five best performing EMEA countries in monthly recurring revenue and growth.
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