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IBM will open a cloud data center facility in Hong Kong for its subsidiary SoftLayer on April 14, according to InformationWeek. ! Z" T3 ?+ _; ~5 B7 d1 | ) o+ \( K, v) f4 Q' E9 c) O% v3 MThe opening of the Hong Kong facility will mark the first of 15 data centers IBM said it is building throughout the year as part of a US$1.2bn investment for the expansion of its cloud storage business.$ h! D% y5 M% R! S
3 w$ P5 L2 @4 z ZThe Hong Kong facility will have capacity for 15,000 servers and will have network connectivity provided by Equinix, NTT and Tata.7 D/ N$ U5 b; U5 M
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Softlayer’s CEO Lance Crosby said in an interview with InformtionWeek the next Softlayer data center sites will most likely be Canada, Mexico, UK and Australia.2 @/ B5 n$ r" Q1 P5 a$ \( O! z
. B! p4 J/ u7 R4 D6 s0 P; A, u$ XIBM Watson will be available in the new Hong Kong facility making it only one of three facilities to provide the business intelligence engine- the other facilities to provide Watson are in London and Dallas.$ w1 s ^, p" R4 V6 K
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IBM’s BlueMix platform-as-a-service on Softlayer - which was announced last month- will also be available from the Hong Kong site.. x/ x1 }; v: q4 {; z. ?9 b$ }7 ?
C% [0 u& B5 e; M" j9 uBlueMix is an implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture, leveraging Cloud Foundry to enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks. ( O: t3 X+ l* N$ G) b, T, u, X; l' J( l" q
IBM said it will follow flexible pricing schemes as it deploys BlueMix, allowing customers to consume it by the hour, by the month, or by the seat. " d0 l8 J/ i L+ D , S1 [# ]+ v: V; E2 x3 ~. ` ^