IBM opens new Sydney cloud
- 11 March, 2015 12:04
IBM has opened a new SoftLayer cloud centre in Sydney, as part of a $1.2 billion investment to build 15 new data centres around the world. This follows the launch of a similar centre in Melbourne in August last year.
Big Blue on Wednesday said that since the launch of its first cloud centre in 2014, it has added “hundreds of new customers” and experienced a boom across SoftLayer facilities in the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo.
One of those customers is Australian ChannelPace – which sells a crowd-sourced contact management system. The company expanded into 56 countries as a part of Catalyst, SoftLayer’s startup acceleration program, IBM said.
“As a member of Catalyst, we were able to leverage IBM’s cloud entire SoftLayer portfolio, including its unique network-within-a-network architecture, which has helped us deliver unlimited traffic on the network between servers in different data centre locations around the world,” said ChannelPace's CEO, Greg Furlong.
The Sydney cloud centre offers bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. The infrastructure was built using a ‘pod’ design and has the capacity for thousands of physical servers.
Services are deployed on demand with full remote access and control through a web portal or API, which enables organisations to create public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.
New Zealand customer, Grinding Gear Games – which hosts role playing game Path of Exile in five IBM Cloud centres – expects to eliminate latency and provide a better experience for users as the SoftLayer network expands.
“Extremely fast provisioning times and the ability to automate such provisioning allow us to treat SoftLayer’s bare metal servers like virtual servers so that we can scale up rapidly when player numbers increase,” said Chris Wilson, managing director of Grinding Gear Games.
“SoftLayer’s free and reliable back-end connection between data centres is critical to the stable operation of our game service.”
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