SoftLayer Cloud Customers Get IBM Disaster-Recovery Services

Following its acquisition of infrastructure-as-a-service provider SoftLayer last year, IBM is adding its disaster-recovery services to the company’s offerings, in a move intended to help accelerate cloud adoption.

SoftLayer’s 20,000 clients will initially have access to IBM’s Cloud Virtualised Server Recovery (VSR) managed service, which enables the replication of entire systems in real-time, as well as IBM’s Resiliency Consulting Services, which help with resiliency assessment, planning, design and implementation.

Security services on the way

Later this year SoftLayer customers will have access to other IBM security services, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, web and email protection and managed endpoint security services, IBM said.

The company also announced it is opening two cloud-based resiliency centres, one in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the other in Mumbai, India, which join 15 other centres planned by SoftLayer and IBM’s 150 existing Business Continuity And Resiliency Services (BCRS) centres. The new centres are intended to reduce network latency and to help customers comply with data residency compliance regulations, IBM said.

Separately, IBM announced several new services adding to its BCRS offerings, including Cloud Managed Backup, Cloud Data Virtualisation, Cloud Application Resiliency and Cloud Virtualised Server Recovery.

In addition to these announcements, IBM said it has signed up Novitex Enterprise Soltions in a $10m agreement to provide cloud-based infrastructure services using SoftLayer’s offerings.

Cloud expansion

IBM says it has spent more than $6bn (£4bn) in acquisitions since 2007 to build up its cloud business. At the time of its acquisition by IBM, SoftLayer was the world’s largest privately held IaaS player, and had also been courted by EMC.

IBM said in January it was committing more than $1 billion (£610m) towards new data centres around the world in order to deal with the continued rise in demand for cloud computing.

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