IBM Opens First Japanese Data Centre

IBM has opened its first cloud data centre with SoftLayer in Tokyo, Japan, representing the next step in its $1.2bn cloud assault.

The facility in Tokyo will work with 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 centres worldwide.

Evolving market, says IBM

The location also offers Japan a dedicated facility to store sensitive data that needs to abide my data residency and privacy laws.

“Since we established a Singapore cloud data centre in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer.

“Our new cloud data centre 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 centres, 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 centre 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.