Over the weekend, IBM opened their new SoftLayer data centre in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong centre is the first of 15 new centres to be unveiled, as part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its cloud services on a global scale.

“Our expansion into Hong Kong gives us a stronger Asian market presence as well as added proximity and access to our growing customer base in region,” Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer said. “This new data center gives the fast-growing, entrepreneurial businesses that Hong Kong is known for a local facility to tap into SoftLayer’s complete portfolio of cloud services.”

Softlayer’s cloud infrastructure, incorporating hardware, virtual servers, storage and networking allows users to be architects of their own cloud optimal cloud environments. End users in the Hong Kong region now have access to SoftLayer services with less than 40 milliseconds of latency. The data centre itself has capacity for over 15,000 physical servers and connectivity provided by Tier 1 carriers such as NTT, Tata and Equinix.

Hong Kong is becoming an increasingly popular destination for data centres; last month, we reported that Alibaba opened their fourth data centre here. But establishing big data infrastructure in this regional market is not without its obstacles; the SoftLayer centre opening was delayed by a month, due to delayed approval from the Chinese government. Parent company IBM are also facing struggles in China, as the government investigates whether Chinese banks’ reliance on IBM servers compromises national financial security.

Read more here.

(Photo credit: Bob Mical)

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