IBM recently announced plans to open a new North Carolina data center. The facility will support the company’s growing cloud service footprint and will be located in Research Triangle Park, one of the largest research parks across the globe.
The company purchased and renovated an existing building in the park to create the 72,000 square foot North Carolina data center. The facility includes computing space, as well as office and lab space, a kitchen, a lounge, conference rooms and other amenities. The Research Triangle Park data center also has fiber optic network connectivity in place, joining the facility with four fiber optic providers.
At the time of the announcement, IBM noted that the facility will be a cloud resiliency center focusing on addressing the increasing demands for disaster recovery and business continuity. IBM projected that by 2015, that market will generate $32 billion in profits. Currently, the company is one of the largest providers of disaster recovery services, holding more than 12,000 customer contracts to date.
The new facility has gained interest from the community, and Monitise, one of the largest mobile banking and payment companies in the world, has already signed a contract to lease space there.
“It’s a dangerous world, unfortunately, and we’re a major piece of keeping our customers up and running and safe and always on,” said Alice Williams, IBM Business Continuity Resiliency Services director.
This isn’t the first North Carolina data center for IBM, which also selected Research Triangle Park as the site for another facility in 2008. Overall, IBM’s campus in the park spans 4 million square feet and this newest facility would be one of 150 resiliency facilities throughout the world, as well as one of 15 offering SoftLayer services.
