IBM's SoftLayer company, a cloud management provider, has launched a service designed to enable enterprises to establish a dedicated network connection from their own IT infrastructure to SoftLayer private network and cloud services. The new service, Direct Link, provides a hybrid cloud solution.
“The power of a company’s private infrastructure and internal applications increases exponentially when they are able to scale out onto the cloud, from SaaS providers to financial institutions that want to do just that,” said Matt Chilek, chief technology officer for SoftLayer, an IBM company. “We have customers ranging from startups to enterprises. Direct Link helps them optimize their workloads and get more value out of their data. They can move both to and from SoftLayer as easily as if our bare metal and virtual servers and storage were part of their local area network.”
Direct Link consists of a physical, dedicated network connection from a customer’s data center, office, or colocation facility to SoftLayer's data centers and private network through one of the company’s 18 network points of presence around the world. These facilities reside within facilities operated by SoftLayer partners including Equinix, Telx, Coresite, Terremark, Pacnet, InterXion and TelecityGroup, providing exceptional access for SoftLayer customers with infrastructure collocated in the same facilities.
By eliminating the role of the public Internet for customers when connecting to the SoftLayer private network, Direct Link is intended to help enterprises control access to their infrastructure and services, the speed of their connection to SoftLayer, and how data is routed, providing higher network performance consistency and predictability, streamlined and accelerated workload and data migration, and improved data and operational security.
For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit www.ibm.com/cloud.