IBM is today announcing two new data centres specifically built for Federal Government business, with the first one slated to go live as early as next week.
Built on SoftLayer platform, the two new data centres are a part of a larger network of data centres that will cater to government cloud requirements.
The first facility located in Dallas, Texas will go live on June 16 and the second facility located in Ashburn, Virginia will go live by autumn, IBM has revealed.
To be eligible for Government projects, IBM has built the data centres keeping in mind the requirements under Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and both the new facilities have been certified against these two certifications.
IBM has revealed that both the facilities will initially support 30,000 servers and a network that is capable 2,000 Gbps connectivity between them.
Governments are certainly keen in adopting cloud infrastructures, with CIA giving away its contract to AWS being a prime indicator of this, but there have been talks of hybrid infrastructure, which the Big Blue isn’t capable of pulling off on its own.
It may be intending to scrape away few AWS customers, but it will certainly face stiff competition from AWS and its partners who have already established themselves has one of the best players as far as cloud goes.
And there is Microsoft Azure which has been building up on its strengths lately both in pure cloud as well as hybrid cloud platforms.
