SoftLayer moves to London and adds bare metal

IBM has announced that its SoftLayer datacentre services operation will be opening a new datacentre in London this month. This is part of a $1.2bn investment being made by the company, which will also include a new datacentre in Paris, giving extensive new coverage for Europe. It will also be a host site for the company’s new bare metal service offering, aimed at customers looking for flexible service provision that gives them dedicated service capabilities that exceed those often possible with virtual server-based resources.

The new facility will provide customers and their end users with SoftLayer services that meet in-country data residency requirements. It will also complement the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data centre and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012, to provide European customers redundancy options within the region.

“The bare metal service will allow customers to take a snapshot of what is running on a virtual machine and load it onto a bare metal system,” said SofLayer VP, Stephen Donnelly. “They will also be able to snapshot what is running on a bare metal system and load it onto a virtual machine. This gives them total flexibility to match workloads against resources.”

The addition of bare metal services is becoming something of a trend amongst service providers, as it fills the gap some users are finding between the operational certainties of using expensive on-premise resources and less reliable – in hard-nosed service delivery terms – than running applications in virtual servers and multi-tenanted resources. Bare metal allows service providers the opportunity to offer users dedicated resources faster and more flexibly that a user investing in their own additional resources, but at a cost and timescale that makes more operational sense than a similar on-premise investment.

SoftLayer services will provide solutions ideal for businesses based in London and surrounding areas. The region is a key cloud market, with customers using cloud to deploy web-centric workloads or to transform their existing operations. One third of the world’s largest companies are headquartered in London and a majority of the world’s largest financial institutions have operations there. Additionally, London has one of the world’s largest communities for technology startups, incubators, and entrepreneurs.

“A key objective for SoftLayer is to ensure that users are never more than 40 milliseconds away in terms of service latency,” Donnelly said, underpinning why the new London datacentre became in obvious site for investment.

The London data centre will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer data centres and network PoPs around the world. With these services deployed on demand, and with full remote access and control, customers will be enabled to create their ideal cloud environment—whether it be public, private, dedicated and/or hybrid.

SoftLayer will start taking orders for the London datacentre in July with a special offer of up to $500.00 USD off new orders, for a limited time.