IBM Opens First Cloud Data Center With SoftLayer

As part of its $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint, IBM has announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Germany. Located in Frankfurt, the new facility provides customers with a local cloud center to help them meet Germany and Europe’s strict security and data privacy regulations, improving application performance by lowering latency for local customers.

“Data privacy regulations in the European Union (EU) are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”

The Frankfurt facility is part of SoftLayer’s unique global network, differentiated by its network-within-a-network architecture, and offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, with only 7 milliseconds of latency from SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility and less than 330 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world.

It also complements existing European IBM Cloud facilities in Amsterdam, London, and Paris and broadens redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world by enabling backups that can be replicated and integrated in any other SoftLayer cloud data center, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.

In Germany, cloud adoption is on the rise, spurred by the cost savings and flexibility gained by moving operations and workloads to the cloud. The number of German enterprises using the cloud grew by 32 percent between 2012 and 2013, and The Experton Group forecasts the value of the cloud market in Germany at €18 billion by 2017.

Germany consistently ranks within IBM Cloud’s top five best-performing EMEA countries in terms of total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth. German customers using IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure include those in the gaming, digital marketing and advertising, and online and IT services businesses.

German customer Avira provides IT-security protection to computers, smartphones, servers, and networks, delivered as both software and cloud-based services. This year, the company introduced several new Internet security products, all built on IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure.

“IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer was a dream partner the whole way,” said Jason Radisson, executive vice president of online business for Avira. “From the initial R&D work on a handful of bare metal servers through market release and rapid take up in our user base, SoftLayer responded to our requests swiftly and adroitly. Today, this infrastructure is handling hundreds of millions of requests per hour at peak times. Based on this experience, SoftLayer has become our go-to cloud infrastructure partner for scaling new products.”

The Frankfurt cloud center follows SoftLayer’s standardized pod design, having the capacity for thousands of physical servers and offering the full range of cloud infrastructure services, including SoftLayer’s bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. It seamlessly integrates via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) around the world. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

Customers can receive up to $500.00 USD off of new orders for the Frankfurt cloud data center for the first month of service, for a limited time.

SoftLayer, an IBM Company, operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With 100,000 devices under management and a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible unified platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications.