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IBM Rolls Out Federal Government-Specific Cloud Infrastructure

This article is more than 9 years old.

Another day, another announcement from a feisty IBM regarding its cloud business. IBM is today announcing a new network of data centers, built on its SoftLayer platform, that are specifically focused on federal government business. Alongside the actual data centers, IBM is rolling out some high speed networking to help data transfer for its customers.

The first center in the new federal network, located in Dallas, Texas, will, according to Big Blue, be online by June 16. Thereafter a second facility in Ashburn, Virginia will be available this Fall.  The two centers meet the important certification programs for the governmental space, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).  In terms of scale, the new data centers will initially have capacity for 30,000 servers and a network designed to support 2,000 gigabytes per second of connectivity between them.

This is part of IBM’s previously announced $1.2B investment in its global cloud footprint. While those sort of announcements are par for the course, it is nice to see vendors follow up with some specific capital expenditure based on top of previous announcements. According to the company, by the end of 2014, IBM will operate 40 data centers across five continents, and will at the same time double SoftLayer cloud capacity. Fifteen new data centers will be added to the existing fleet of 25, in cities including China, Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, Canada, Mexico City and Dallas.

In all of this IBM is trying to get a steal on its cloud uber-competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS). While AWS famously won the CIA cloud contract, and has recently been talking about hybrid cloud as an important and credible approach towards infrastructure, they are unable to deliver a strong hybrid story at this stage.At least not on their own.

While AWS partners with private cloud vendor Eucalyptus such that customers can build AWS-compatible private clouds and hence gain a quasi-AWS hybrid, that is different from a true public/private mix from a single vendor as IBM is offering here. Of course it’s not all in IBM’s favor. It doesn’t have a pedigree as a cloud vendor, and its pricing is generally on the steep end of things, especially compared with AWS. That said, the largest customers, public or private, are less interested in cost than they are the enterprise credibility of their vendor. And this is one area that IBM can leverage – their long term history as a supplier to these sorts of customers.

In terms of the networking news, IBM’s Direct Link offering gives enterprises the ability to have a direct pipe between their own infrastructure and SoftLayer’s cloud. This is, of course, a copy of what both AWS and Microsoft Azure already deliver customers and its a very important part of delivering upon the hybrid cloud opportunity.

I would say that these direct connect set ups are now table stakes and every vendor that has even an off-chance of being a credible hybrid player will need to offer it as a matter of course. In terms of pricing for IBM’s own offering, Direct Link pricing is set at $147 for a 1Gbps PORT and $997 for a 10Gbps PORT. On top of that IBM customers will also not be charged for bandwidth usage.

IBM is fighting hard and I’d be reluctant to write them off any time soon. They’re winning customers, building out infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, talking like a real cloud vendor these days. Game on!