IBM has announced Peruvian mining company Minera Chinalco Peru has purchased an IBM server, storage and virtualization solution to provide a technology platform that would support its expanding national operations.

The solution is being deployed in the client's main data center in Lima as well as its mining location in the Junín Region.

Chinalco replaced its current installed technology with the new solution composed of IBM System x servers, Storwize storage systems and virtualization software for all of its processing and application deployment needs.

A virtualization strategy has been put in place to create a path to cloud adoption in the future.

The solution includes 16 BladeCenter HX5 blade servers and 2 BladeCenter H chassis servers at the Lima data center, and 34 BladeCenter HX5 blade servers and 3 BladeCenter H chassis servers with redundant components at the Junin mine site.

Each location has one Storwize V7000 cluster providing a combined total of 56 terabytes of storage, with a TS3500 tape library and Tivoli Storage Management software providing backup at each site. At both sites, VMware virtualization software is being installed for some systems.

Chinalco is part of the Aluminium Corporation of China, and is the world's second largest alumina producer and third largest producer of aluminum. It operates the Toromocho copper project in Peru, which is located 90 miles east of Lima in the Junin Region.

IBM has also announced a partnership with 21Vianet Group, a major data center provider in China, to bring the Armonk, New York-based giant's enterprise cloud services to the country.