IBM Opens First SoftLayer Datacenter in Australia
IBM today announced the opening of a new SoftLayer data center in Melbourne, Australia. The Melbourne data center follows recent launches in Toronto, London, and Hong Kong, and is part of IBM's $1.2 billion global investment to expand its cloud footprint farther into Asia-Pacific and throughout the world.
"Melbourne is our first data center location in Australia and a significant milestone for SoftLayer. We can now bring all the benefits and advantages of SoftLayer's cloud platform to customers in country or to customers looking for an Australian location," said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. "This facility meets all the demands for deploying secure, in-country enterprise-grade IBM cloud services which will help accelerate cloud adoption among organizations responding to the current IT sea change."
The facility provides customers with Australian data residency and an even faster way to reach local end users, all with SoftLayer's secure and resilient platform that can be easily integrated with existing infrastructure to provide a robust hybrid environment. The Melbourne location will complement SoftLayer's Hong Kong and Singapore data centers, offer APAC customers redundancy options within the region, and provide interoperability between all of SoftLayer's global locations.
"SoftLayer's new location in Australia is huge for us. Data sovereignty issues are top-of-mind for many of our customers in Australia, so the ability to now move data to this particular region is very advantageous to us," said Mark Phillips, vice president of global sales at Atmail, a Queensland-based company that provides an email-messaging platform to more than 4,500 customers worldwide. "We have customers in 123 countries, so SoftLayer's expanding global presence is fantastic for us."
SoftLayer's strategic global partner Digital Realty built the Melbourne facility, along with the Toronto, London, and Hong Kong locations. The design of the Melbourne data center matches that of other SoftLayer data centers around the globe, with capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers initially.
SoftLayer's complete portfolio of infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking, will be available out of Melbourne. The new facility will provide 10Gbps network connections to SoftLayer services with less than 40 milliseconds of latency from anywhere in the world.
In addition to Atmail, other SoftLayer customers in the region include Fluccs, Rightship, Loft Group, HotelsCombined, Digital Market Square, Bugwolf, Cartesian, and Portland Software.
"We've been a SoftLayer client for more than 10 years," said Angus Thomson, managing director for cloud hosting provider Fluccs. "SoftLayer has always been our preferred cloud supplier in the U.S. due to the simplicity of setting up new servers, the speed of deployment, and the ability to customize something exactly to our requirements."
