IBM Announces London SoftLayer Data Centre

Peter Judge,

IBM’s SoftLayer business plonks a server barn down in Chessington to satisfy London customers’ need to keep their data local

IBM has announced the London data centre it promised as part of a $1.2 billion cloud expansion plan centred on its SoftLayer subsidiary will be built in Chessington.

The data centre is one of fifteen being built around the world, to offer SoftLayer customers local data services, and will be linked to a network point of presence (PoP) in London, and to SoftLayer’s Amsterdam data centre, both of which were launched in 2012. The first customers will get deals offering up to $500,000 off for a limited time, IBM said at the announcement of the new facility.

ibm-logo-serverKeep it safe, keep it local

The big expansion is designed to help customers meet requirements that their data be kept within their own country by offering more local data centre capacity.

The London site will have room for up to 15,000 physical servers, and the capacity will be built in stages within four separate modules. “There are four pods, walled off and segmented,” said Steve Canale , co-founder of SoftLayer at the London launch. “Customers can have servers in two separate modules for redundancy.”

Each of the four modules contains 150 racks, in 10,000 square feet of data centre space, and can hold up to 4000 servers, with 2MWatt of power provided with n+1 redundancy.

Customers can have their own firewall so they are separated form other customers, or share a firewall provided by SoftLayer, for a slightly lower cost, explained Jonathan Wisler, EMEA vice president of IBM SoftLayer. “Not many providers offer single or multiple tenancy.” The site will also allow customers to choose between bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking, and build public, private or hybrid clouds.

London is important, explained Wisler, because a third of the world’s largest companies have offices there, and it is a home for two thirds of the world’s advertising agencies.

One ad industry player already using the new data centre is mobile ad platform MobFox, an established SoftLayer customer. “We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, BMW, Netflix and McDonalds,” said Julian Zehetmayr MobFox CEO. “London is a key location for a company like ours, operating in the digital advertising space.”

IBM bought SoftLayer in 2013, making it the centre of its cloud services offering.

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