By Graham K. Rogers

A number of major corporations are now beginning to invest heavily in future cloud technology and centers. Apple for example has a number of plants in the United States, including Maiden, North Carolina, data centers in California locations, with another under construction in Prineville, Oregon to join those in Austin, TX, Munich, and Cork.

IBM too is expanding its data centers and recently announced that - as part of its $1.2 billion global investment - the IBM subsidiary, Softlayer will open a data center in London: the latest of 15 new data centers that IBM has planned.

The London center will work with the already existing London and Amsterdam units, "to provide European customers redundancy options within the region." In a press release, it was reported that SoftLayer CEO, Lance Crosby, said "We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we're excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers".

An example of a successful deployment of cloud use by a Softlayer client is MobFox, a successful mobile advertising platform in Europe, whose CEO, Julian Zehetmayr, said, "MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years. We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds." He added that London is a key location for such companies and that they were excited about deployment of SoftLayer servers directly in London.

The data center will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking, allowing it to integrate with all SoftLayer data centers and network PoPs around the world. Customers can create deal cloud environments: public, private, dedicated and/or hybrid.

There is more information about cloud offerings from IBM available online, as well as a blog on cloud services.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.