The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/20/ibm_cloud_computing_data_centres/

IBM wraps fat tentacles around fluffy clouds

Disaster Recovery 2.0

By Kelly Fiveash

Posted in Storage, 20th August 2008 10:31 GMT

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IBM will splash $300m on 13 new data centres in 10 countries in its latest bid to fluff up cloud computing.

The tech giant announces the plans later today, but the pre-briefings show the centres are to be used for disaster recovery. Customers will house their back-ups in data vaults, which they can access very quickly over the web, in the event of a business continuity failure. Apparently [1], this is much cheaper than the the data mirroring of yore.

IBM has been reaching deep into its sizeable pockets all year, hungrily gobbling up storage start-ups. That sent a clear signal about the company’s intentions to climb aboard the cloud.

Since the start of 2008 it has bought Softek, NovusCG, XIV [2], Arsenal Digital Solutions, Diligent [3] and FilesX [4].

Earlier this month IBM spent $360m [5] on a data centre at its Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina, and an undisclosed sum on a smaller farm in Japan, to gain a bigger foothold in the increasingly crowded cloud computing services market. ®