Alibaba's cloud computing business Aliyun announced that its second data center in America's Silicon Valley formally started operation yesterday.
This is Aliyun's ninth data center in the world and it is also the company's third overseas data center opened this year. It is expected to satisfy the cloud computing resource demand of Aliyun's users in western America in the next three to five years.
In March 2015, Aliyun launched its first data center in Silicon Valley as it was starting to provide cloud services to users in North America and the world. In August 2015, the company announced the formal opening of its data center in Singapore, covering Asia Pacific regional markets. So far, Aliyun has deployed regional nodes in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Qingdao, Shanghai, Singapore, and United States. In the future, the company plans to establish new data centers in Japan, Europe, and the Middle East, aiming to improve its global network layout.
Yu Sicheng, vice president of Aliyun, said that they launched three overseas data centers in 2015 and their overseas business increased by over four times. They will distribute more data centers in the future to serve global users.
In regards to its product portfolio, Aliyun said its second data center in Silicon Valley will offer more than ten products, including elastic cloud server, virtual private cloud, object storage service, relational database service, cloud monitoring, cloud shield, open cache service, KVStore, open table service, resource access management, and analytic database service.
Foreign rivals like Rackspace and Amazon have had difficulties entering the China market, partly because of China's obtuse ISP legal framework and partly because those foreign companies have limited support and brand awareness within China. So Aliyun's expansion into the global arena gives the Alibaba-backed company more barriers for Amazon and Rackspace to climb if they want to acquire Chinese clients.
Amazon last year started beta testing its China services, but it provides the services via an arms-length proxy partnership with ChinaNetCenter. Amazon last month tried to ramp up some interest in its services with events in China, but the buzz around the services still appear tepid.
Rackspace too has been trying to enter China for over ten years, with limited success. The copany has been hamstrung by early users from many years ago facing large support hurdles with Rackspace's U.S. operations, and those memories and stories live on and give the company a harried brand name.