IBM, which has been setting a lot of importance on its cloud services and infrastructure recently, today declared that it is opening four new data centers in the United States. These new amenities — two in Washington, DC and two in Dallas, Texas— bring IBM’s overall number of data centers for its cloud to 55. In the U.S, IBM not supervises 22 data centers.
As IBM noted in its periodical earnings release in April, profits from its cloud services were up 33 percent in the most recent quarter, with its entire cloud revenue hitting $14.6 billion in the last 12 months. So while we don’t frequently talk about IBM when we talk about the foremost public clouds (think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), it’s absolutely a major player in this business. And given that revenue from many of its other business units is either lessening or lethargic, it’s an evident move for the company to greatly invest in this part of its business.
“IBM is making major investments to enlarge our global cloud data centers in 2017 and offer the infrastructure essential for enterprises to run the cognitive, big data, blockchain and IoT workloads they require,” noted John Considine, general manager for cloud infrastructure, IBM, in today’s announcement. “IBM’s rising global cloud footprint crosswise 19 countries and six continents give ventures the flexibility and level to run their most compound workloads when and where they require.”
The company is looking forward to opening four supplementary data centers in the first half of 2017.
While IBM’s marketing tends to focal point on Watson and other “intelligent” services, it also puts a serious emphasis on bare metal servers, particularly in a blend with Nvidia GPUs which developers can utilize for their own high-performance computing function or train their own machine learning models. With Bluemix, it also controls one of the largest OpenStack clouds and with the open-source OpenWhisk project; it’s sponsorship the current tendency toward “serverless” computing.
