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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " b$ _; { P: g B* Y 4 Q& \3 ~. z9 X rIBM will open a cloud data center facility in Hong Kong for its subsidiary SoftLayer on April 14, according to InformationWeek.6 ~; |9 _) ^/ I3 u
( y" F* B7 g3 q# QThe 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$1.2bn investment for the expansion of its cloud storage business.# E0 I) v! R; W6 J' U. i; J; J" i/ H, x
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The Hong Kong facility will have capacity for 15,000 servers and will have network connectivity provided by Equinix, NTT and Tata. . e ], t) R. B$ P3 U( U1 q2 b0 Y, N# N6 r: d
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. & |# T0 ]! M1 J3 }4 X. l8 y, x3 z
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. 3 x" J+ \! c D: L5 G2 Y3 q8 @; c, F7 ]5 F/ V
IBM’s BlueMix platform-as-a-service on Softlayer - which was announced last month- will also be available from the Hong Kong site. ! d. ?1 M1 A7 Z- V J+ A! H& u 7 U9 h! |. W* a# l% o' XBlueMix 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.& V* u& I" {+ D2 U8 t: s9 K
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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.# A# h3 U0 ^+ q* r2 S0 ]
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