Exclusive: IBM seeds UK server farm talk

IBM Global Services has been shopping around ISPs in the UK to discuss bandwidth to service a huge potential server farm in Portsmouth or London's South Bank.

The vendor refused to make an official comment, but one IBM insider confirmed to PC Week that plans were in the pipeline to build huge Web facilities in Europe to boost capacity for strategic outsourcing.

IBM wants to replicate the scale of the company's enormous server farms in Illinois, Maryland and Ohio, which were used for hosting the Wimbledon Web site. This boasted a record 942 million hits over the two week period of the tournament.

Three of the largest UK Internet service providers - Psinet, GX networks and Uunet - were all approached by IBM last week.

One ISP said that IBM had been enquiring about the cost of a 34Mbps leased line, the yearly cost of which he estimated at £500,000.

IBM's bandwidth shopping could affect its relationship with AT&T. In November, AT&T bought IBM Global Network, its private data and communications system, for $5 billion (£3.2 billion).

Both companies made outsourcing commitments: IBM said it would outsource a large part of its global networking requirement to AT&T, worth about $5 billion (£3.2 billion), while AT&T would outsource much of its data centre activities to IBM, estimated value $4 billion (£2.4 billion).

Because of those commitments, the ISPs were surprised to be asked to tender for the IBM bandwidth. But one source pointed out that AT&T's coverage in the UK is pretty limited and that the telecoms giant was relying on third party carriers, such as Psinet.

IBM announced its plans last month to get into applications hosting for the SME market, although at the time the company said it would use its existing server farms at Portsmouth, Warwick and Dublin.

But early indications were that any huge server farm would be used for strategic outsourcing to big business, such as banks, because IBM has reportedly ruled out renting space at shared premises such as Telehouse, for security reasons.

For more stories see this week's issue of PC Week UK

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