IBM Builds Two Softlayer Data Centers for U.S. Federal Workloads

IBM is ready to open the first of two new Softlayer Cloud Services data centers designed and dedicated for U.S. government workloads and compliant with Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements.

IBM will open the first of the new data centers in Dallas, Texas, this month.  Later this year, it anticipates activating a companion center in Ashburn, Virginia.  Each of the high-security data centers will have initial capacity for 30,000 servers.  They will be connected by an isolated, robust private network with 2 Tbps of capacity.

IBM is also building a dedicated Security Operations Center for the new data centers to provide government clients with added security, availability and incident response capabilities.

“Government clients will find SoftLayer services delivered via these new centers give them the ideal platform for the mission critical workloads they are moving to the cloud, or new web-centric workloads,” said Anne Altman, General Manager, US Federal, IBM.  “We’ve designed these centers with government clients' needs in mind, investing in added security features and redundancies to provide a high level of availability.  With business partners enabled to deliver cloud solutions via the new SoftLayer centers for the Federal government, we are fostering an ecosystem of innovation."

IBM said the new data centers are part of the $1.2 billion commitment to it announced earlier this year to expand its global cloud operations in all major geographies and financial centers. By the end of 2014, IBM will operate 40 data centers across five continents, and will double SoftLayer cloud capacity. Fifteen new data centers will be added to the existing fleet of 25, in locations including China, Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, Canada, Mexico City and Dallas.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44131.wss