IBM opens Cloud Data Center in São Paulo and enters into agreement with Investe São Paulo
With the partnership, the company will rely on the support provided by Investe SP in the next steps of the project
Investe São Paulo
On September 15, the director of Investe São Paulo, Sérgio Costa, participated in the opening ceremony of the second data center of IBM Cloud in Brazil, in Jundiaí (São Paulo). During the event, held in São Paulo, the GM of IBM Brazil, Marcelo Porto, along with Costa, signed a document that marks the support of Investe São Paulo in the development of the project.
“We want to help São Paulo to continue consolidating its position as a center of innovation and technology in Latin America,” said the director of Investe São Paulo.
Porto also reinforced the role of institutions such as Investe São Paulo to encourage the modernization of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) structures in Brazil. “It is essential to have the government as a partner for the state to be included in the global innovation platforms,” he said.
The new center is the first in Brazil to offer full access to a range of services for the construction of local cloud solutions, while global customers can take advantage of faster network speeds, improve performance and reach end users even faster.
This year, IBM will also launch full web support, which will also be available in Portuguese for SoftLayer customers. This will make it even easier for Brazilian companies to use the platform to transform their operations in the cloud.
“The market has entered a new phase. We are going through a moment of great change for businesses, where the breakdown of traditional business models is constant and businesses undergo a change and seek to adapt at every moment, said Tomaz Oliveira, cloud computing leader at IBM Brazil. “IBM has always focused on meeting the companies’ needs and now we see Cloud Computing as the facilitator for these companies to enter and survive in this new market,” he said.
According to the research institute Frost & Sullivan, the cloud computing market in Brazil is expected to grow double-digit over the next two years due to the growing interest of companies for technology. According to the institute, the Brazilian cloud segment reached US$ 474.8 million in 2014 and should reach US$ 1.11 billion in 2017.
While cost reduction remains the main driver for the adoption of the technology, 45% of Brazilian IT executives who answered the survey said that cloud supports the innovation of their business and another 45% said that cloud provides great flexibility for their companies to explore new market opportunities.
By providing a local platform that allows the use of IBM Cloud resources to Brazilian customers, IBM also increases the flexibility for data storage and processing in the country. The new data center joins the other two IBM Cloud data centers in Latin America: in Hortolândia, São Paulo, and in Queretaro, Mexico, along with an extensive network of global data centers, providing customers with more options for data redundancy and data recovery, ensuring business continuity in the event of accidents.
With capacity for up to 9000 servers and power rating of 2.8 MW, the data center located in São Paulo offers the full range of IBM Cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal and virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. The data center follows the standard classification Tier III of Uptime Institute, which ensures no interruptions in case of equipment replacement and maintenance.
From this new data center, the connections with IBM Cloud services in Latin America will be reduced to just milliseconds. The new data center can also host OpenStack-based solutions including those from Blue Box, a recent IBM acquisition. This helps extend the reach of any OpenStack environment, enabling customers to connect to infrastructure and managed services that support efficient architectures, including AIX on Power Systems. This gives customers more flexibility and choice when it comes to open standards and hybrid cloud deployments.
The company operates more than 40 cloud data centers in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe, so that the customers are able to obtain the Cloud resources exactly where they are and when they need. Users have granular visibility of data center locations – with the exact indication of the city – allowing the implementation of critical Cloud workloads in strategic geographic areas seeking to minimize network latency, improve application performance and comply with local regulations.
IBM has more than doubled the overall capacity of SoftLayer data centers since it invested US$ 1.2 billion in 2014 to a massive expansion of data centers around the world. Now, this globally integrated network of cloud data centers, across all major continents, offers companies the ability to scale and build their IT resources as needed, thus minimizing the risk. When used with Bluemix, PaaS offering from IBM, developers can easily create and test new applications in full production environments anywhere in the world, while also having access to internal resources such as Watson for cognitive computing services, as well as dozens of third-party services.
About IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud offers the largest portfolio of software, services, data center solutions and consulting in the industry, for private, public and hybrid cloud environments. In the second quarter (ended on June 30, 2015), the total revenues reported by IBM Cloud were US$ 8.7 billion, of which US$ 4.5 billion corresponded to XaaS. With Bluemix, Platform as a Service solution, mobile application development platform IBM MobileFirst and the global network of data centers SoftLayer, IBM has been assisting small and large organizations to adopt, manage, scale and benefit from the open cloud technology.