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
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 (http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSN1936716820080820), 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 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/02/ibm_acquires_xiv/), Arsenal Digital Solutions, Diligent (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/18/ibm_buys_diligent/) and FilesX (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/ibm_buys_filesx/).
Earlier this month IBM spent $360m (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/ibm_cloud_computing/) 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. ®