IBM said Wednesday that it has launched new data centers so its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services can better cater to government workloads.
Specifically, the datacenters are designed to meet US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements. The datacenters will open in Dallas and Ashburn, Virginia.
The SoftLayer datacenters will initially have capacity for 30,000 servers. IBM also said it has arranged for SoftLayer partners to directly provide services to the government. SoftLayer is seen as IBM's Amazon Web Services killer inside Big Blue.
IBM is a key IT vendor for the US government on multiple fronts. SoftLayer is the public cloud portion of the equation for IBM, which also focuses on hardware and software inside hybrid datacenters and private clouds. IBM's bet is that most government agencies will use private cloud deployments.
Big Blue also said it is building a dedicated security operations center for government customers. IBM has said it will invest $1.2 billion in building out its cloud data centers and infrastructure.
As part of the government push, IBM also launched its Bluemix platform as a service for the Federal government.
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