IBM Boosts Cloud Resiliency

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There are a lot of different reasons why organization choose to leverage the cloud, including disaster recover and resiliency. Disaster recovery is a business that IBM knows well and is now expanding in the cloud era with a new cloud resiliency center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

IBM’s entire Research Triangle Park campus covers four million square feet of space. The new cloud resilience center covers 72,000 square feet.

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“This is a new center, not a retrofit,” Mike Errity, Vice President, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, told Datamation. “The new center represents IBM’s single largest USA cloud resiliency site investment.” He said the company could not comment on the dollar amount.

Errity added that IBM has more than 50 years of business continuity and disaster recovery experience with over 150 resiliency centers across 50 countries. He added that 90 percent of those centers have cloud resiliency capabilities.

At the Research Triangle Park location, the new cloud resiliency solutions are offered on IBM Softlayer and can accommodate public, private and hybrid IT environments.

From a resiliency perspective, for the new center, IBM has multiple components in place. Errity said that IBM is leveraging a dedicated multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) wide area backbone network known as RecoveryNet. The RecoveryNet is a high-capacity, private utility network dedicated to IBM Cloud Recovery services.

“RecoveryNet supports cross-site connectivity requirements, client test and recovery solutions,” Errity said.

The networking resiliency uses dual path fiber and makes use of multiple carriers including CenturyLink, Level 3, Verizon, Time Warner Telecom, and AT&T, with Frontier as the serving Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC).

By using multiple carriers, IBM is able to address any potential latency issues with customer sites. “For latency sensitive applications, IBM engages the carriers to identify the most effective route,” Errity said. “WAN acceleration is available based on clients requirements.”

While the new center in Research Triangle Park is opening, IBM has plans for more to open soon. Errity said that later this year IBM will be opening another new cloud-based resiliency center in Mumbai, India.

“These new facilities, which will join the 150 resiliency centers and 15 other global centers planned by SoftLayer, will speed up recovery times by virtually eliminating network latency while allowing businesses to manage federal and local data residency compliance regulations,” Errity said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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