IBM expands its UK presence with 4 new data centers

#IBM today announced that it is launching four new data centers in the U.K. This brings IBM’s total data center footprint in the U.K. to six, in addition to 16 other locations across Europe. This is yet another example of the company’s increasing infrastructure investment. The first of these new U.K. locations in Fareham will go online in December, with the other three U.K. locations launching next year. As an IBM spokesperson told me, IBM isn’t building its own data centers, though. It’ll lease raw space and build out its own infrastructure (electrical, networking, compute, storage, etc.) in these leased spaces. The last new data center IBM opened in Europe was its Oslo location, in September, but the company also recently expanded its presence in Asia with the launch of its Korean data center in August. In total, IBM’s cloud services are now available in 50 data centers. IBM is betting on a number of different brands for these data centers. Its Watson cognitive services, for example, are only one of hundreds of different services that run in its data centers. Under the SoftLayer brand, it also offers more basic cloud servers and storage solutions, as well as its Bluemix platform as a service offering. But there is also the OpenStack-based Blue Box private cloud as a service and a plethora of other services that run on those different platforms.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/ibm-expands-its-uk-presence-with-4-new-data-centers/