Big Blue today took the wraps off its second SoftLayer data centre in the Montreal suburb of Drummondville. IBM Canada just eight months ago cut the ribbon on a Toronto-based SoftLayer facility.
According to IBM Canada officials, the Québec facility is part of $1.2 billion investment in cloud computing from the Armonk, N.Y.-based giant. SoftLayer currently has a customer base of more than 1,000 organizations including start-ups, financial services/insurance, public sector and retailers.
Clients Baseline Telematics Inc. and Silanis Technology Inc. of Montreal were looking for greater level of application performance and responsiveness, in-country data redundancy while lowering latency by storing data workloads locally.
For IBM Canada it was important to place the second SoftLayer facility in Quebec because the vendor wanted to offer French language access for companies in the region.
Outside of Canada, IBM has opened five SoftLayer cloud centres, including recently established facilities in Frankfurt, Germany; Querétaro, Mexico; and Tokyo, Japan. IBM also plans to open cloud centres in Italy and India by the end of 2015.
Baseline Telematics president and CEO Paul-André Savoie, said in a blog post, that SoftLayer’s cloud infrastructure underpins Baseline’s “Pay-As-You-Drive” telematics insurance platform that helps insurers differentiate their products in increasingly competitive markets using high-tech solutions that allow them to act more effectively and with greater accuracy.
“The insurance industry is in the midst of a transformation, and technology trends like telematics is one of the factors responsible for this change,” he added.
For Savoie partnering with IBM allowed his company to provide identical, local and customer-specific deployments for global clients regardless of location.
Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s CTO, said 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.
The new cloud centre offers the full-range of SoftLayer and IBM Cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, 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, allowing customers to create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
