IBM adds second Cloud Centre in the Netherlands

SoftLayer has opened a second cloud data center in the Netherlands, located in Almere, just outside of Amsterdam. The new facility helps meet the rapid growth of IBM Cloud by doubling its SoftLayer capacity in the region, and provides even more options in the country and region for redundant data storage and geographically isolated services, ideal for creating secure and comprehensive backup and recovery strategies.

The Almere data center is securely connected by private network to all SoftLayer data centers around the world. IBM Cloud operates SoftLayer facilities in North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including data centers in the greater London area, Paris, Frankfurt, and an existing data center in Amsterdam. IBM Cloud customers can leverage this geographic diversity and seamless integration to mitigate business risk by replicating their data or creating redundant operations in multiple locations. In case of unexpected events, a customer can quickly recover their data or balance or reroute workloads between locations.

“This new facility demonstrates the demand and success IBM Cloud is having at delivering high-value services right to the doorstep of our clients,” said James Comfort, IBM General Manager of Cloud Services. “We’re reaching customers in a way that takes all the guess work out of moving to the cloud. They can build and scale applications, run the toughest big data workloads, have the level of security they need, all in country and connected to a truly global platform.”

One customer already leveraging these advantages is leading Dutch IT and telecommunications services provider KPN. As part of an existing partnership with IBM, KPN sells cloud services built on SoftLayer infrastructure. The company plans to deliver value-added cloud services to over one million small, medium-sized, large, and corporate businesses across the Netherlands via the new SoftLayer facility.

“We are committed to offer services allowing our customers to stay on the leading edge of innovative developments,” said Louis Rustenhoven, director Marketing & Sales KPN Business Market. “With our partnership with SoftLayer, our end users will be able to take advantage of cloud services that not only meet their in-country data residency requirements, but will also offer a choice between three IaaS options: bare metal servers, single-tenant and multi-tenant virtual machines, for most optimized performance, security, scalability and manageability.”