IBM opening two state-of-the-art disaster recovery/resiliency centres

IBM is about to cut the ribbon officially opening two new state-of-the-art datacentres intended to provide disaster recovery and resiliency services, one in the Raleigh, N.C. area and other in Mumbai, India.

According to Alice Williams, IBM director of strategy and portfolio for global business continuity and resiliency services, the Raleigh center just opening now is about 72,000 square feet of raised floor to accommodate a wide range of needs associated with backup and recovery with an additional 8000 sq. ft. for purposes such as tape data storage. With high-speed connectivity available from multiple service providers as well as dark fiber line connections, the center is also designed to support the IBM SoftLayer technology approach to tasks associated with virtual machine redundancy and Big Data processing at Infiniband speeds up to 56Gbps.

SoftLayer Technologies is the dedicated server, managed hosting and cloud computing provider acquired by IBM last year for about $US2 billion to form the basis of IBM Cloud Computing Services.

"SoftLayer is a new tool in our resiliency arsenal," said Williams. While the new Raleigh and Mumbai data-resiliency centers can accommodate traditional hardware/software/work area disaster-recovery needs for businesses in emergencies, they are built to take on a newer type of cloud-management services recovery as well. "It's virtual server recovery," says Williams. "We spin up distributed cloud pods in our resiliency center."

+ Also on NetworkWorld:Cloud computing causes re-thinking of disaster recovery+

IBM general manager for business continuity and resiliency services, Laurence Guihard-Joly, said the Raleigh center is opening this month and the Mumbai data-resiliency center is expected to open in early September. The support for SoftLayer offers an approach for round-the-clock resiliency in production environments based on customer use of private, public and hybrid cloud services on a global basis. The "always on" expectation started with banking, says Guihard-Joly, but now it's a generally-accepted idea that any online service that's provided by business or government should always be available.

"It impacts your reputation if you have an outage," she points out. "Today we have more and more clients that have requested reduction of time recovery."

IBM is no newcomer to the disaster-recovery and resiliency arena. The two new Raleigh and Mumbail data-resiliency centers will be joining the array of about 150 other business continuity data centers that IBM operates.

Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: MessmerE. E-mail: emessmer@nww.com