IBM's
SoftLayer has launched a cloud data center in Japan - its first in the country. Located in Tokyo, the center helps Japanese customers store data on Japanese soil and avoid issues related to data monitoring that have been prevalent since Edward Snowden's revelations regarding the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring of the cloud.
SoftLayer manages a global network of data centers and around 100,000 devices. The company's new Tokyo-based cloud data center will be able to offer "thousands of physical servers" alongside the "full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services" such as virtual servers, storage, networking, and bare metal servers. It will cater for IBM's recent 600% increase in cloud customers in Japan and represents a component of IBM's $1.2 billion investment that aims to extend the company's global cloud presence.
SoftLayer's new facility sits alongside its Asia-Pacific facilities in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Australia and Singapore. It offers SoftLayer additional data redundancy capability and adds additional geographic diversity. The new center will support Asia-Pacific customers and SoftLayer's customers worldwide.
"Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market," explained SoftLayer's CEO, Lance Crosby. "Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world."
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