IBM company SoftLayer has revealed plans to open a data centre in London this month.
It will be the latest of 15 new data centres that IBM plans to open as part of a $1.2bn dollar global investment to strengthen and extend its cloud services in Europe and around the world.
The new facility will provide customers and their end users with SoftLayer services that meet in-country data residency requirements. It will also complement the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data centre and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012, to provide European customers redundancy options within the region.
Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO, said: "We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we’re excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data centre right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers.
"The work these businesses are doing — the solutions and services that they are building in the cloud – is inspiring. Organisations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications."
One such customer is MobFox, the largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform in Europe.
Julian Zehetmayr, MobFox CEO, said: "MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years. We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds.
"London is a key location for company like ours, operating in digital advertising space and serving global clients. We are very excited about the option of deploying SoftLayer servers directly here."
SoftLayer services will provide solutions ideal for businesses based in London and surrounding areas. The region is a key cloud market, with customers using cloud to deploy web-centric workloads or to transform their existing operations. One third of the world’s largest companies are headquartered in London and a majority of the world’s largest financial institutions have operations there.
Additionally, London has one of the world’s largest communities for technology startups, incubators, and entrepreneurs.
The London data centre will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer data centres and network PoPs around the world. With these services deployed on demand, and with full remote access and control, customers will be enable to create their ideal cloud environment – whether it be public, private, dedicated and/or hybrid.
SoftLayer will start taking orders for the London data centre in July with a special offer of up to $500 off new orders in the data centre, for a limited time.
