IBM has unveiled its new IBM Cloud Services data centers, which offer SoftLayer’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to companies struggling to meet the US’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Programme (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

The SoftLayer data centers will initially have the capacity for 30,000 servers and share a private network with 2,000 Gbps of connectivity.

IBM said the SoftLayer ecosystem will be available to partners to offer 100 applications and services - such as security, desktop virtualization and geospatial services - directly to government clients.

The first of the new data centers will open in June in Dallas, Texas, with a second in Ashburn, Virginia, by the end of 2014.

The new data centers are part of IBM’s US$1.2 billion plan to expand its global cloud operations for IBM Cloud Services in all major geographies and financial centers, following the acquisition of Softlayer in June 2013 for $2 billion.

IBM said that by the end of 2014 it will operate 40 data centers across five continents and will double its SoftLayer cloud capacity.

A further 15 data centers will be added to the existing fleet of 25, in locations including China, Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, Canada and Mexico City.

The SoftLayer platform provides single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud servers and storage.

SoftLayer bare metal servers - dedicated, single-tenant servers – will provide the processing on a scale needed for high workloads and advanced analytics used by federal research, healthcare and academic organizations, said IBM.

IBM also announced the launch of Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) acceleration program for US Federal, aimed at brining together developers, independent software vendors and federal systems integrators.

The program includes new training and tools for in-house developers in federal agencies and business partners.

Bluemix, which was built on SoftLayer's cloud infrastructure, is aimed at helping federal developers to build, test and manage apps for mobile, social and analytical projects.