Enterprise IT vendor IBM said the SoftLayer data centers announced today will have initial capacity for 30,000 servers and share private network with 2,000 gigabytes per second of connectivity.
IBM says its Cloud Services data centers offers SoftLayer cloud infrastructure-as-a-service built to meet US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements.
With this announcement, IBM is also opening the market for the SoftLayer ecosystem, enabling business partners to deliver over 100 applications and services such as security, desktop virtualization and geospatial services directly to government clients.
Government agencies can create hybrid and private cloud environments that integrate on-premise and cloud-based workloads through the new data centers. IDC said hybrid and private clouds are expected to make up 80 percent of federal cloud deployments.
IBM will open the first data center in Dallas, Texas, this month. The IT vendor is also planning a companion center in Ashburn, Virginia, later this year.
IBM is building a dedicated Security Operations Center for the new data centers to provide government clients with added security, availability and incident response capabilities. Through its solutions, agencies can achieve optimized application performance and responsiveness via SoftLayer, and faster application development, deployment and delivery.
Anne Altman, general manager, US Federal, IBM, said: “We’ve designed these centers with government clients’ needs in mind, investing in added security features and redundancies to provide a high level of availability. With business partners enabled to deliver cloud solutions via the new SoftLayer centers for the Federal government, we are fostering an ecosystem of innovation.”
By the end of 2014, IBM will operate 40 data centers across five continents, and will double SoftLayer cloud capacity. Fifteen new data centers will be added to the existing 25, in locations including China, Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, Canada, Mexico City and Dallas.
As part of today’s announcement, IBM launched the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service Acceleration Program for US Federal. The program will launch new education and tools for in-house developers in federal agencies and business partners.
Pix source: IBM
