IBM Opens SoftLayer Data Center in Montreal Area

IBM has opened a SoftLayer data center in Drummondville, an hour outside of Montreal, Canada. The new data center follows a recent Toronto data center opened in August of last year.

The facility is the latest as part of a $1.2 billion ongoing investment in its cloud business. The Drummondville data center is similar in scope and size to the recent Toronto facility, with room for more than 8,000 servers. While Toronto has long been publicly disclosed as one of the planned data centers, this facility is a recent addition to list of planned expansions.

This is the fifth SoftLayer data center center launched in four months. The others are in France, Germany, Mexico and Japan. Other data centers expected in 2015 will be in Milan, Italy and Chennai India. At the time of acquisition SoftLayer had 13 data centers. Under IBM that total has more than doubled in short order.

The data center expands customer capabilities when it comes building private, public or hybrid clouds, with the ability for in-country data redundancy in both Montreal and Toronto. Drummondville is an hour and a half away and is actually in a different seismic and climatic zone than Montreal.

“The local presence of SoftLayer’s cloud center not only demonstrates the company’s significant investment in Québec, but also its unique ability to meet the needs of Canadian customers to quickly leverage untapped business models and services with cloud,” said Denis Desbiens, IBM Vice President, Quebec in a release

The full suite of services is available including bare metal, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. These services can be deployed on-demand with full remote access and control through a customer Web portal or API. Services also are available in French.

“As the second-largest city in Canada, Montréal is a vital center of commerce and technology,” said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s CTO, in a release. “Canada is an important market for IBM Cloud services and this new facility will provide regional customers with the security, resiliency, and scalability for placing demanding workloads in the cloud.”

Montreal and the surrounding area features relatively low-cost clean hydro power. Montreal has great connectivity to New York, Toronto, and Europe.

Last month, Cogeco said it was opening a 100,000 square foot data center in Montreal.