Archivo de la categoría: SoftLayer

cloud pricing, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, SoftLayer

SoftLayer ups RAM, drops storage and compute costs

SoftLayer rejigged its cloud pricing

SoftLayer rejigged its cloud pricing

SoftLayer announced new pricing model it said would make the company more competitive among other cloud providers, in part by not charging for many of the networking costs.

“While other cloud providers advertise “low” prices for incomplete solutions, they neglect to mention extra charges for essential resources like network bandwidth, primary system storage, and support. At SoftLayer, our servers already include these necessary resources at no additional charge,” the company explained on its blog.

“Our new pricing model includes a redeveloped ordering and provisioning system that offers even more granular pricing for every SoftLayer bare metal and virtual server, from the processor to the RAM, storage, networking, security, and more.”

It also announced location-based pricing, meaning the company will uniquely price cloud services based on datacentre location.

Under the new cost model compute (dual Xeon ES-2620 4U processors) and storage costs dropped while RAM prices increased slightly – though the company said users can expect to save close to 40 per cent overall.

The latest round of cloud cost cutting follows similar moves from others to strip out fees and drop cloud service prices. AWS, Google and VMware have all adjusted their pricing downward in the past few months.

Datacentre, IBM, Marc Jones, News & Analysis, Nicola Ciniero, SoftLayer

IBM stands up SoftLayer datacentre in Italy

IBM has added its first SoftLayer datacentre in Italy, and its 24th globally

IBM has added its first SoftLayer datacentre in Italy, and its 24th globally

IBM announced the launch of its first SoftLayer datacentre in Italy this week, which is located in Cornaredo, Milan.

The company said the datacentre in Milan, a growing hub for cloud services, will enable it to offer a local option for Italian businesses looking to deploy IBM cloud services. The facility, it’s 24th SoftLayer datacentre globally, has a capacity for up to 11,000 servers, a power rating of 2.8 megawatts, and is designed to Tier III spec.

“The Italian IT sector is changing as startups and enterprises alike are increasingly turning to the cloud to optimize infrastructure, lower IT costs, create new revenue streams, and spur innovation,” said Marc Jones, chief technology officer for SoftLayer.

“The Milan datacentre extends the unique capabilities of our global platform by providing a fast, local onramp to the cloud. Customers have everything they need to quickly build out and test solutions that run the gamut from crunching big data to launching a mobile app globally,” Jones added.

Nicola Ciniero, general manager of IBM Italy said: “This datacentre represents a financial and technological investment made by a multinational company that has faith in this country’s potential. Having an IBM Cloud presence in Italy will provide local businesses with the right foundation to innovate and thrive on a global level.”

The move comes just a couple of months after IBM added a second SoftLayer datacentre in the Netherlands.

hybrid cloud, IBM, M&A Activity, Private Cloud, SmartCloud, SoftLayer

IBM Acquiring SoftLayer for Private Cloud Infrastructure

IBM is acquiring SoftLayer, a privately held cloud infrastructure provider. IBM hopes SoftLayer will enable IBM to  marry the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds with the economy and speed of a public cloud, with Fortune 500 companies the target market.

IBM says the majority of the Fortune 500 have concerns about how cloud will work with the IT investments they have already made, and many have been waiting for a cloud that is better than “good enough.”   As a result, although cloud is growing quickly, it’s still only a small part of the total IT spend.  There’s a lot of opportunity for IBM to capitalize on.

SoftLayer has a breakthrough capability that provides an easy “on ramp” especially for the Fortune 500 to adopt cloud. And for the SoftLayer born-on-the-cloud customers, IBM opens a new market into the enterprise.   Specifically, SoftLayer allows cloud services to be created very quickly on dedicated servers — rather than a virtual ones, which is the norm in the public cloud.

By building out a cloud on a dedicated server , a client no longer has to worry about sharing computing resources with other companies — thereby improving privacy, security and overall computing performance.  By using dedicated servers, software that was built for on-premise use can be more easily ported to the cloud.  It doesn’t have to go though as much heavy configuration as it does with a virtual server, which it was not developed to work with.

This capability will be added to IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio. IBM SmartCloud offers 100 cloud-based solutions for line-of-business execs including Watson Engagement Advisor; hybrid solutions such as IBM PureSystems, mission-critical cloud services for SAP on our SmartCloud Enterprise+ and the best private cloud solutions in the market.

Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer serves 21,000 customers with a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. SoftLayer excels at running cloud-centric, performance-intensive applications in mobile, social, gaming and analytics.

IBM is also announcing today the formation of a new Cloud Services division that combines SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform, reporting to SVP Erich Clementi, IBM Global Technology Services.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close later in 2013 following standard regulatory review.