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IBM opened two SoftLayer cloud data centers this week – nearly 10,000 miles apart. The first is located in Drummondville, a suburb of Montréal, in Canada. The other facility is situated almost a world away in Sydney, Australia.

IBM headquarters in Armonk, NY
IBM headquarters in Armonk, NY – Photo by Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Both regions are now home to two SoftLayer data centers. Last year IBM’s cloud business opened up its first Australia-based data center in Melbourne. Likewise, Big Blue opened its first SoftLayer center in the Toronto area in August of last year.

IBM purchased SoftLayer and its cloud data center infrastructure for $2bn in 2013. Since then, it promised to invest over US$1.2bn to expand its cloud-based business through the SoftLayer brand. In January 2014, IBM announced plans to add 15 data centers to its global portfolio to help meet customer demand regarding local regulatory compliance and data sovereignty issues.

“Aligning with client preferences for keeping data in country, the new cloud center provides a second Canadian location in which local customers can store, compute, and back up data. This is especially important to financial institutions, public-sector organizations, and many large enterprises,” IBM said in its announcement.

“As the second-largest city in Canada, Montréal is a vital center of commerce and technology,” said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s CTO, in a press statement. “Canada is an important market for IBM Cloud services and this new facility will provide regional customers with the security, resiliency, and scalability for placing demanding workloads in the cloud.”

IBM has hit the APAC region hard during the expansion. The new Sydney data center comes on the heels of other SoftLayer facilities opened in Hong Kong, Mumbai and – most recently – Tokyo. There are unconfirmed reports that IBM would like to locate a SoftLayer center in South Korea during the coming year, but the company has only publicly confirmed interest in a Chennai, India, location.

Other recent locations for the IBM SoftLayer spree include Mexico, Frankfurt, Dallas, and London, with announced plans on a Paris center already in the works.