Mary-Louise Hoffman
IBM has established new data centers that will offer a SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform designed to help federal clients manage and secure their workloads on premise or in the cloud.
The SoftLayer cloud facilities are built to host 30,000 servers and share a private computer network connectivity of up to 2,000 gigabytes per second, IBM said Wednesday.
One SoftLayer data center is scheduled to open in Dallas this month, while a companion facility in Ashburn, Va. is slated to commence operations later this year.
“We’ve designed these centers with government clients’ needs in mind, investing in added security features and redundancies to provide a high level of availability,” said Anne Altman, general manager of IBM’s U.S. federal business.
Altman added the company aims to help business partners deliver cloud applications as well as desktop virtualization, security and geospatial service offerings through Softlayer data centers.
Softlayer IaaS is built to comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, according to IBM.
IBM has also launched a new program to help developers in the federal and business sectors build, configure and test a range of cloud-based mobile, analytics and social apps.
The Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service Acceleration Program offers training, workshops and certification on government cloud deployments, IBM says.
