IBM to Open SoftLayer Data Center in Paris

The IBM SoftLayer data center expansion rolls on, and the next stop is Paris. IBM announced it will establish SoftLayer’s first cloud data center in France. The site will complement recently opened London and Amsterdam locations.

The expansion is part of an ongoing $1.2 billion investment by IBM to grow its SoftLayer data center infrastructure and cloud offerings. The investment was committed in January, with 15 data center expansions planned, which will bring the total portfolio to 40 total data centers across five continents.

The move is more European cloud in the name of proving data sovereignty and lower latency. AWS just opened a region in Germany citing data privacy as a major driving force as well. SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby said the Paris location will allow it to support workloads and applications from customers who want their data to stay in the country and secure in the cloud.

It's no longer satisfactory to have a single cloud region covering all of Europe. Several providers are building clouds inside individual countries to serve local needs. The largest amount of activity is occurring in the major connectivity hubs.

SoftLayer already does solid business in France, citing the country as one of its top 10 best performing markets in EMEA. Worldwide, SoftLayer said it has over 100,000 devices under management.

IBM SoftLayer’s cloud differentiates from AWS largely with bare metal offerings. The company also offers virtual servers, storage and networking out of the location.

The new deployment has capacity for “thousands of servers.” Notice the difference in parlance from previous expansions as part of the $1.2 billion push, which have all been uniformly described as space for 15,000 physical servers.

SoftLayer is partnering with Global Switch here. Most of the recent expansions have been in Digital Realty Trust facilities. This has been true with recent launches in Toronto, London, Hong Kong, and Melbourne.