Alibaba to Open Second Silicon Valley Data Center to Meet Rising Cloud Demand

Hangzhou, China, October 9, 2015 – Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group's (NYSE: BABA) cloud computing arm, today announced that it has launched its second data center based in Silicon Valley in the United States, addressing increasing demand for affordable and secure, mission-critical cloud computing while creating an infrastructure for high availability and effective disaster recovery. Cloud customers can apply for the center's services starting Monday (October 12).

The new facility is Alibaba Cloud's ninth globally and the fourth data center announced in 2015, after its first U.S. data center in March 2015, a Singapore data center announced in August, and an environmentally-friendly lakewater-cooled data center at Qiandao Lake, China in early September. AliCloud also maintains data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China, and plans more facilities in other international locations in the Middle East, Asia and Europe in the future.

The new U.S. data center is designed to accommodate the cloud and big data requirements of customers in the West Coast for the next three to five years. AliCloud's second U.S. data center will feature the same service level agreements (SLAs) as its first US data center, plus a portfolio incorporating all AliCloud services currently available in international markets.

The Alibaba Cloud portfolio at the new data center will include more than 10 cloud services that are designed to assist customers focused on accelerating innovation, including start-ups looking to reduce the cost of cloud-based service delivery and big data analytics, as well as established businesses in the gaming, multimedia and mobile Internet industries.

The Alibaba Cloud cloud services designed to help enterprises achieve premium performance and high availability that are available from Silicon Valley include:

• Elastic Compute Service (ECS), a simple and efficient computing service enabling scalable processing capacity;
• Analytic Database Service (ADS), a real-time high-concurrency online analytical processing (real-time OLAP) service;
• Cloud Monitor System (CMS), an open platform for real-time monitoring of sites and servers;
• Distributed Relational Database Service (DRDS), an online service for distributed relational databases;
• Key-Value Store (KVS), an online Key-Value storage service compatible with the open-source Redis protocol;
• Message and Notification Service (MNS), an efficient and elastic distributed message service;
• Open Cache Service (OCS), an online caching service for rapid access of hotspot data;
• Open Table Service (OTS), a NoSQL database service;
• Open Storage Service (OSS), a massive, secure and highly-reliable cloud storage service;
• Relational Database Service (RDS), a reliable, elastic online database service;
• Server Load Balancing (SLB), a load-balancing service that distributes traffic over multiple cloud servers;
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), an isolated and customized network environment including other AliCloud services; and
• Yundun, a security service which includes distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, host intrusion prevention, vulnerability detection, Trojan detection, and more.

"Our data centers are typically located in key innovation and commerce hubs around the world, where we expect growing demand for cost-efficient cloud computing and big data analytics services. Our second U.S. data center is situated in Silicon Valley which is the epicenter for technology innovation world-wide," said Ethan Sicheng Yu, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud data centers help deliver outstanding performance, including advanced rack design, flash storage and modular infrastructure. AliCloud's new Qiandao Lake data center is among the most energy-efficient in the world.

A number of new partnerships with cloud solution providers have also been inked to enhance AliCloud's global value proposition. These partners, including Mesosphere, Bankware Global, Appcara, Appnovation, Cloud Comrade and Panzura, complement the services offered by AliCloud's data centers around the world, by enabling providing premium cloud products and services that are closely integrated with the AliCloud platform, ultimately reducing infrastructure costs and improving networking efficiency.

"AliCloud is focused on building a comprehensive and holistic global ecosystem that offers world-class cloud computing and a nuanced understanding of local requirements. We expect to welcome more partners and customers onto the AliCloud platform as we extend our global reach and continue to deliver outstanding value for our cloud computing infrastructure services," added Yu.

Alibaba Cloud's overseas strategy aims to help Chinese enterprises reach the world, and help foreign enterprises enter China's market. The launch of the data centers in Silicon Valley enables Internet companies in China to expand their businesses in North America. Beyond existing data centers, AliCloud's strategies are being guided by customer demand. AliCloud will be seeking local partners such as experienced companies in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) areas, as well as developers dedicated to open source projects, to work with AliCloud. "Opening up", "win-win", and "inclusive technology" are AliCloud's principles that will help AliCloud develop localized strategies to cater to local markets.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in September 2009, AliCloud , Alibaba Group's cloud computing arm, develops highly scalable platforms for cloud computing and data management. It provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to support the participants of Alibaba Group's online and mobile commerce ecosystem, including sellers, and other third-party customers and businesses. AliCloud is a business within Alibaba Group.