IBM Adds to "Cloud" Facilities
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) opened one new data center and unveiled plans for another and a research laboratory in Pacific Rim countries, reflecting its growing business in cloud computing, in which applications remotely run on shared computers.
IBM said it will build an 80 million New Zealand dollar (US$57 million) data center in Auckland, New Zealand, that will be completed in 2010.
The company disclosed that it has just completed building a data center that is twice as big in Songdo International City, Incheon, South Korea. It declined to disclose its spending on the Korean facility.
In a related development, IBM said it is opening an 80-person research laboratory in Hong Kong to develop collaboration technology for cloud-computing applications based on IBM’s Lotus software. That lab will be an arm of IBM’s 5,000-person China Development Laboratory, its largest software lab.
