Rising infrastructure costs, limited scalability, complex management, and increasingly stringent compliance requirements make traditional on-premises data centers difficult to sustain.

IBM Cloud’s Direct Link Dedicated Hosting (DLDH) helps businesses offload the burden of managing physical infrastructure by providing secure, globally available colocation facilities. With built-in redundancy in power, cooling, and connectivity, DLDH ensures business continuity while enabling rapid scalability.

From a financial perspective, colocation shifts spending from CapEx to OpEx, reducing upfront costs and freeing resources to focus on innovation and growth. It accelerates time-to-market, supports resource flexibility, and enhances resilience.

Offering Colocation in Data Centers: A Foundation for Successful Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategies

Modern IT demands secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure to handle critical and complex workloads. Hybrid cloud strategies—which blend the agility of cloud services with the control and security of on-premises resources—are increasingly vital for businesses. To effectively implement this approach, DLDH offers colocation in IBM Cloud data centers and ultra-low-latency connectivity to IBM Cloud, playing a pivotal role in driving our customers’ hybrid cloud strategies.

Understanding DLDH

DLDH provides physical space within professionally managed data centers and offers direct connectivity to IBM Hybrid Cloud infrastructure (Classic, VPC, and PowerVS) through dedicated and resilient links. The diagram below shows a high-level view of DLDH colocation with connectivity to IBM Cloud via two resilient Direct Link connections.

Instead of building and maintaining their own facilities, our customers lease space, power, cooling solutions, and network connectivity from IBM DLDH. To better serve our customers, we have partnered with leading colocation service providers globally and are available across all IBM Cloud data center facilities worldwide.

Key Advantages of the Shared Infrastructure Model

• Enhanced Connectivity: Ultra-low latency (~5ms) between colocation and IBM Cloud for real-time workloads.
• Strong Security & Compliance: 24/7 surveillance, biometric access, fire suppression, and adherence to global and regional standards.
• Scalability & Agility: Rapidly add or remove servers, storage, or networking gear without CapEx-heavy investments.
• Lower TCO: Avoid the high costs of building and maintaining private data centers.
• Disaster Recovery: Resilient infrastructure across diverse regions ensures continuity during disruptions.
• One-Stop Shop: IBM manages colocation end-to-end, eliminating the need for multiple vendors.

Common Use Cases

• Low Latency / Edge Applications: Time-sensitive AI, analytics, and high-performance computing workloads.
• Hybrid Cloud: Integrating on-premises assets with IBM Cloud services for performance and efficiency.
• Specialized Hardware & Compliance: Host GPUs, bare metal, or regulatory-specific systems close to IBM Cloud.
• Backup & Disaster Recovery: Create geographically separate but cloud-adjacent recovery sites.
• Data-Intensive Workloads: Minimize transfer costs and latency by processing data closer to where it resides.

Customer Success Stories

1. A Leading Cloud Storage Provider: IBM enabled the rapid setup of a highly specialized colocation environment that met strict regulatory requirements—delivered on time and supporting hybrid cloud data management at scale.

2. Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services: DLDH powers secure colocation environments for hardware security modules (HSMs), enabling global multi-cloud key management.

3. Global Technology Services Provider: Leveraged IBM DLDH for multi-cloud connectivity via Direct Link, ensuring secure, scalable integration with IBM Cloud and beyond.

Why DLDH Matters

IBM Direct Link Dedicated Hosting delivers an efficient, flexible, and secure way to manage enterprise infrastructure while integrating advanced IBM Cloud technologies.

By colocating in IBM’s state-of-the-art facilities, organizations can unlock:

• High-performance computing
• Real-time analytics
• Secure transactions
• Scalable hybrid/multi-cloud strategies

—all while maintaining compliance and full control over critical infrastructure.

With IBM DLDH, colocation isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s about enabling your business to innovate, scale, and thrive in a hybrid cloud world.

Authors: Ahmed Osman (Offering Leader- IBM Cloud Network), Asutosh Jha (Offering Manager-DLDH), Vijay Sharma (Offering Manager-DLDH)