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- L3 n. }- h. K% N) h$ ?9 dIBM will open a cloud data center facility in Hong Kong for its subsidiary SoftLayer on April 14, according to InformationWeek.: z/ N4 D; b y; G1 S6 S4 x
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The 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$1.2bn investment for the expansion of its cloud storage business.# w$ H( M" {4 F2 ^# c0 N
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The Hong Kong facility will have capacity for 15,000 servers and will have network connectivity provided by Equinix, NTT and Tata.& J+ q3 I5 F/ N+ b1 ^
2 F i) }6 L5 r) YSoftlayer’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. 0 X0 K+ J- Z( a0 f! q3 A/ B5 H7 a! G8 J" X, m) W% \
IBM 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. ' B" {0 P: w0 K. w % b4 Y3 s! @" S; a4 DIBM’s BlueMix platform-as-a-service on Softlayer - which was announced last month- will also be available from the Hong Kong site.- e& F6 R& \2 ^' H( u
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BlueMix 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.% G# B7 W& b) k' d. t
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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. % ^; z5 a5 R1 Q) I/ ~5 D" J; d9 z" J- h* [8 s3 H. M