US based cloud service provider SoftLayer launches Asia Pacific presence

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 21 September 2011 09:37

IT Industry - Strategy

SoftLayer Technologies, a US based provider of cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting services - named by Australian market researcher firm Longhaus as a leading offshore cloud provider in Australia - has entered the Asia Pacific market with the opening of a data centre in Singapore and network points of presence in Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

"Beginning September 23, customers can pre-order services in the new data centre to be deployed when the data centre and PoPs officially 'go live" on October 3," the company said.

CEO Lance Crosby, said: "We've had an international customer base for quite some time, with almost half of our 23,000 customers coming from more than 140 countries besides the US."

In March SoftLayer issued a press release saying "[Australian] research firm Longhaus has named SoftLayer the strongest offshore (no Australian data centre) trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider for Australian enterprises."

According to SoftLayer, "Longhaus conducted a detailed review based on 60 criteria resulting in the top 34 short-listed cloud providers currently serving Australian customers. Longhaus' Pulse methodology rates vendors based on their company performance, overall cloud solution and commitment to the Australian market."

However the text of the press release was at odds with the headline which said only that SoftLayer had been named "a top 10 cloud IaaS provider in the Australian market." iTWire has sought confirmation from Longhaus as to its ranking of SoftLayer.

According to SoftLayer its new data centre has capacity for more than 16,000 servers, redundant network infrastructure, a fully-automated platform and a unique pod design concept. The data centre and the Tokyo and Hong Kong PoPs "feature connectivity from multiple tier-1 network carriers, including NTT, Tata, and Equinix, with direct network connections to SoftLayer facilities in San Jose and Los Angeles," the company said.

"With the strategic location of the Asia-Pacific operations and the exceptional speed of the SoftLayer network, customers and end users anywhere in the region can connect to SoftLayer services with less than 40ms of latency."

It added: "The opening of the Asia facilities will soon be followed by the launch of SoftLayer's Amsterdam data centre and European PoPs, scheduled for early November. SoftLayer will then have 13 data centres and 16 PoPs worldwide. Each data centre is functionally independent with distinct and redundant resources, as well as fully integrated with all SoftLayer facilities.

SoftLayer claims that its data centres are linked by "three distinct and redundant network architectures - public, private  and data centre to data centre - into the industry's first network-within-a-network topology for maximum accessibility, security, and control."