IBM opens Scottish data centre

New Greenock facility aimed at mid-sized firms looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure

IT goliath IBM is set to build a £2m collocation data centre at its Greenock facility in Scotland.

Big Blue’s new energy efficient facility will offer services to mid sized enterprises for the consolidation and centralisation of their IT infrastructures.

The diesel generators, 24-hour security, alarms, CCTV and internet connections will allow businesses to manage their infrastructures in a single location to reduce costs and staff management times.

In addition to IBM’s equipment, the vendor will allow its customers to use their own equipment in the data centre.

The customer will have the choice to manage and monitor the equipment themselves (Collocation) or for IBM to perform the functions for them (Collocation Plus). Customers can move their back office hardware to the data centre and manage it remotely.

Alex Reardon, director of general business sector for UK & Ireland at IBM, said: “This new service aims to offer quick financial returns to a medium sized business by removing the challenge of securing and maintaining their data centres, so potential savings can be ploughed back into their business.”

Matthew Hawkins, chief operating officer at IBM customer SirsiDynix, said: “During our research we focused on strong features such as power, cooling, redundancy (for backup and fail-safe purposes) and cost at the facility level, and company stability at the corporate level.”