IBM Expands Cloud Data Center Footprint

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While cloud computing doesn’t require enterprises and end-users to build new infrastructure, the same cannot be said for cloud computing providers. IBM announced on April 26 that it is opening four new data centers to deal with an explosion of demand for cloud infrastructure.

The four data centers include two in Dallas, Texas and another two in Washington, D.C. John Considine, General Manager for Cloud Infrastructure at IBM, told Datamation that that four new data centers are “net new” facilities — not existing data centers optimized for cloud.

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“IBM opened these new cloud data centers as part of our investment to expand our global cloud footprint in 2017 that is driven by demand, and the ability for our customers to build and deploy their applications across data centers within a region,” Considine said.

Considine added that IBM’s clients want to deploy their applications and keep their data within certain regions, whether that’s for performance, security or flexibility, and with these new data centers, they can deploy their applications in higher availability configurations within a region.

“In addition to the new data centers in Dallas and DC, we’ve made additions in the past year including South Korea and the Nordics as well as announced a tripling of our data centre capacity in the UK,” Considine said.

The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is supported by IBM in all of its cloud data centers. Additionally Considine commented that IBM also supports VMWare and native deployments of bare metal, virtual machines, networking and storage services.

With the new openings this week, IBM now operates 55 cloud data centers in 19 countries around the world today.

Cloud has been a strong area of revenue growth for IBM. In IBM’s first quarter fiscal 2017 financial results which were reported on April 18, IBM reported that it has generated $14.6 billion in cloud revenue over the last 12 months.

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