IBM Opens First Cloud Datacenter With SoftLayer in Japan
Today IBM announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Japan, located in Tokyo. This announcement comes on the heels of recent SoftLayer cloud data center launches in Melbourne and Paris and represents the next step in IBM's $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint.
The facility in Tokyo complements other SoftLayer resources located in cities within the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Melbourne and broadens data redundancy options and geographic diversity within IBM's growing number of cloud data centers worldwide.
It also addresses the industry's growing concerns about data residency and privacy by offering a local Japanese facility to compute and store sensitive data that needs to remain in country.
"Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market," said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. "Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world."
The Tokyo cloud data center is launching at an opportune time for IBM Cloud. Between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014, IBM Cloud's customer base in Japan increased more than 600 percent, and Japanese customers using its SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) now total more than 1,000.
"IBM Cloud's global expansion of SoftLayer cloud data centers, including the new facility in Tokyo, is good for our business," said Hiroyuki Mashita, managing director and vice president of PioneerVC Corporation. "We are based in Japan and have clients located all over the world who use our real-time collaboration solution xSync Prime, which relies on SoftLayer's robust bare metal and virtual cloud servers, services, and worldwide network to provide a low-latency connection. We plan to move some of our clients' accounts and domestic data into the new cloud data center as soon as it opens in Tokyo."
The new facility will provide strategic support for local Asia-Pacific customers as well as global customers that want to reach local end users. SoftLayer's global network, differentiated by its unique network-within-a-network architecture, offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, less than 50 milliseconds of latency from the Hong Kong cloud data center, and less than 270 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world.
"Over the past two years, IBM Cloud's SoftLayer infrastructure has helped us provide a cost-efficient, robust, scalable, and responsive experience for our users, said Mark Sun, co-founder of Singapore-based MotionElements, a royalty-free worldwide stock media marketplace for Asia-focused digital artists. "IBM Cloud has proven to be a very reliable technology provider for us, and we look forward to growing our business with their continued support."
The Tokyo cloud data center has capacity for thousands of physical servers and offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via SoftLayer's leading private network with all SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (POPs) around the world. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers of the Tokyo center can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments to deliver their services with low latency and ultimate efficiency, performance, and low latency.
