IBM To Open SoftLayer Data Centre In Paris

IBM has announced that a new SoftLayer Cloud data centre will open in Paris before the end of the year.

It comes after Big Blue announced in January this year it would invest $1.2bn (£707m) in a cloud expansion plan centred on its SoftLayer subsidiary

Data Sovereignty

IBM bought SoftLayer back in June 2013 and, following that deal, it quickly opted to make SoftLayer the centre of IBM’s cloud services offering.

In June this year it announced a London data centre would be built in Chessington in order to satisfy London customers’ need to keep their data local.

That data centre was one of fifteen being built around the world, in an expansion plan that will bring the total IBM portfolio to 40 data centres across five continents. And now Big Blue has announced that one of those fifteen data centres will be opened in Paris, France, to complement its SoftLayer cloud centres in London and Amsterdam.

IBM says the French data centre will offer clients more options for moving data and operations to the cloud in Europe in a secure environment. And the IBM Cloud will also provide cloud infrastructure services for customers and companies in France that require in-country data residency. Essentially, businesses tend to want their data to remain localised within the country, mostly for regulatory or security reasons.

“We’re addressing clients’ and countries’ growing desire for data sovereignty head on,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “With each new cloud centre we’re bringing our complete cloud services portfolio to the doorsteps of local customers.”

“The Paris cloud centre allows us to support workloads and applications from French customers who want their data to stay in the country and secure in the cloud, and provides our global clients with an opportunity to get even closer to their end user customers in the region,” said Crosby.

There is not much detail about the new IBM SoftLayer facility in Paris, other than it will have “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.”

Cloudy Future?

IBM has been busy in the cloud space recently. Earlier this week it announced a deal with Microsoft, that will see both organisations migrate their respective enterprise software onto Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.

And earlier this month, Big Blue signed a cloud partnership deal with SAP AG. The deal will see SAP offer its Hana Enterprise Cloud on IBM’s Cloud infrastructure.

IBM has also signed a Cloud-based risk analysis deal with Chinese financial data firm Shanghai Wind Information in the summer as it looked to circumvent a growing government crackdown on the use of foreign hardware and software.

It also signed a partnership with Apple, in which IBM will bring its cloud, analytics and mobile management services to iOS, and supply customers with iPhones and iPads running industry-specific applications.

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