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Allianz, the Munich-based financial services multinational, has outsourced management and consolidation of its sprawling global data center infrastructure to IBM.

 

The Armonk, New York-based IT giant will act as Allianz's global provider of IT operations services. IBM will help the German company consolidate its 140 data centers down to six.

 

IBM's engagement with Allianz officially starts in April 2014, and the client expects to have completed transfer to its new IT infrastructure by the end of 2017.

 

The financial services firm's US arm Allianz Global Investors of America has recently consolidated its data center infrastructure. In 2011, it went from five data centers to two, leased from IO, hosting private cloud infrastructure, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

 

The sites are IO's Phoenix and Edison, New Jersey, facilities. It is unclear how, if at all, the agreement with IBM will impact Allianz's deal with IO.

 

Based in Phoenix, IO provides data center space within its unique data center modules called IO.Anywhere. The modules and supporting infrastructure are housed in large warehouse buildings and the company also includes the use of its data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software IO.OS.

 

In addition to being a hardware vendor, IBM is one of the largest IT infrastructure outsourcing services firms in the world.

 

 

It has recently expanded its services play by buying SoftLayer, a dedicated servers and managed hosting provider. IBM said all of its cloud infrastructure services would eventually be served out of SoftLayer data centers.