Softlayer announces in June that the company would be opening a London data center, with the first customer orders being taken in July.
The full range of Softlayer cloud infrastructure services will be available in the new facility, including virtual and bare metal servers, networking and storage. The London data center will also have capacity for 15,000 physical servers and will provide customers with the ability to meet in-country data residency requirements.
The new facility will operate in tandem with Softlayer's existing Amsterdam data center, as well as the company's London network Point of Presence. The London data center will compliment these other facilities, providing customers with increased European redundancy options.
"We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we're excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers," said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. "The work these businesses are doing—the solutions and services that they are building in the cloud—is inspiring. Organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications."
London is an advantageous location for Softlayer, as the city is a key cloud market. A major portion of global financial institutions have offices in London and one third of the world's largest companies are headquartered in the city.
The London data center is just one of 40 new data centers planned by IBM as part of a more than $1 billion investment by the company to grow and strengthen its cloud services around the world. Facilities are being constructed and opened in 15 countries on five continents in the hopes of establishing IBM has a key cloud provider in a market that is estimated to reach $200 billion by 2020.
