NZ businesses already on board as IBM unveils Sydney cloud centre

IBM has announced the opening of its newest SoftLayer cloud centre in Sydney, Australia, with New Zealand companies already taking advantage of its hosting facilities.

As part of company’s US$1.2 billion global investment to expand its cloud services, the new facility joins Melbourne in meeting the growing customer demand for scalable cloud solutions with global reach in Australia and New Zealand.

Since launching its first Australian cloud centre in Melbourne late last year, IBM Cloud has added hundreds of new customers and experienced a boom across other SoftLayer facilities in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Building on this success, the tech giant says the new Sydney facility “makes it easy” for A/NZ customers, or those looking for an Australian location, to tap into IBM’s enterprise-grade offerings.

Furthermore, the move helps broaden data redundancy options within Australia and APAC while providing scalable infrastructure solutions for both enterprise and born-on-the-Web businesses.

Enabling IBM Cloud’s customers to deliver their services at a global scale, New Zealand-based customer Grinding Gear Games hosts the online action RPG “Path of Exile” in five IBM Cloud centres worldwide.

For Grinding Gear Games, the broadening of the SoftLayer global network means eliminating latency and providing a reliable and enjoyable experience for end users.

“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,” says Chris Wilson, managing director, Grinding Gear Games, an independent video game development studio.

“SoftLayer’s free and reliable back-end connection between data centers is critical to the stable operation of our game service.

“As IBM Cloud expands its SoftLayer services to more countries globally, we'll also be expanding the breadth of ‘Path of Exile,’ simply by hosting servers in each new data centre.”

Page Break

In line with IBM’s global cloud drive, the Sydney cloud centre offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking.

Built using SoftLayer’s standardised pod design, the facility holds the capacity for thousands of physical servers.

With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control via a customer Web portal or API, customers can create tailored public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

Cloud commitment

As revealed at the turn of the year, IBM plans to deliver cloud services from 40 data centres worldwide in 15 countries and five continents globally, including North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Consequently, the company will open 15 new centres worldwide adding to the existing global footprint of 13 global data centers from SoftLayer and 12 from IBM.

By some estimates, the global cloud market is set to grow to US$200 billion by 2020; driven largely by businesses and government agencies deploying cloud services to market, sell, develop products, manage their supply chain and transform their business practices.

"IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas," said Erich Clementi, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services, at the time of the global announcement.

“Last year, IBM made a big investment adding the $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer to its existing high value cloud portfolio.

“This announcement is another major step in driving a global expansion of IBM’s cloud footprint and helping clients drive transformation.”