IBM Opens North Carolina Cloud Center

September 29, 2014 Dan Burger

IBM opened the doors to another cloud resiliency center this week. You’ll find it in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, an area in the midst of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. The facility provides cloud-based business continuity capabilities for companies with low tolerance for downtime and without suitable disaster recovery or high availability implementations.

No specifics were given regarding the available platforms at the new cloud center, but similar cloud centers in London and Hong Kong are operating in the SoftLayer cloud, which is chiefly Intel oriented. IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 to gain a customer base and revenue stream as well as he expertise to manage cloud-based infrastructure and software services.

Power Systems customers are also being courted by the SoftLayer business continuity centers. AIX and Linux on Power will be the first to be integrated into SoftLayer. Power-based servers in the cloud are also expected to offer Watson-derived services; specifically Watson Discovery Advisor and Watson Engagement Advisor have been mentioned.

When Power Systems integration with SoftLayer was announced in February, officials indicated that was on schedule to occur in Q2. However, no reports of that have surfaced.

IBM i integration will be added, IBM says, but no time frame has been indicated. Customer demand will, no doubt, be a factor in the timing, which also means the resiliency centers will likely vary from one location to the next.

IBM estimates the overall market for business continuity and disaster recovery to exceed $31 billion by the end of 2015.

Big Blue also projects higher demand for shorter recovery times. Recovery times of 24 to 48 hours–once deemed the industry standard–has shrunk to a matter of minutes. That’s according to IBM’s press release, which doesn’t attribute that statistic to any particular research.

IBM plans to open additional cloud resiliency centers in Toronto, Canada; Mumbai, India; and Izmir, Turkey by the end of 2014.

A distribution agreement between SoftLayer and IBM’s mega reseller Avnet was announced in April. Avnet has more than 350 IBM-dedicated specialists in the United States and Canada. Its main role is assisting downstream business partners accelerate the development of their cloud portfolios and their delivery of cloud services, which will emphasize IBM middleware and software-as-a-service (SaaS) options.

IBM still offers its Power Systems infrastructure services on the SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud. And a number of IBM Business Partners resellers–managed service providers, and software vendors–offer cloud-based infrastructure.