News

Amazon Opens Tokyo Datacenter

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 03/02/2011

To extend its cloud services to Asia-Pacific customers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday announced the opening of a datacenter in Tokyo, Japan.

The move makes Tokyo the fifth region in which AWS has a presence. The new datacenter, which supports the country's native language, is designed to serve Japan-based businesses, as well as international organizations that have Japanese operations. Amazon said it will introduce billing in Japanese Yen in the coming months.

"Japanese companies and consumers have become used to low-latency and high-speed networking available between their businesses, residences and mobile devices," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in a blog post. "With the launch of the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, companies can now leverage the AWS suite of infrastructure Web services directly connected to Japanese networks." Vogels added that the Tokyo datacenter is a viable option for customers in South Korea.

Amazon pointed to a number of companies that intend to use the new datacenters, including Mitsui & Co. Ltd., Cookpad, Olympus Memory Works Corp., SUUMO and social game developers Gumi Inc. and Zynga.

In addition, Amazon said it has a large number of partners in the Tokyo region, including Accenture Japan, Business Architects, CSK, EC-One, Hitachi Solutions, ISID, Intramart CSI, Iret (Cloudpack), JB Advanced Technology, Manabing, Mitsui Knowledge Industry Co. Ltd., Nomura Research and Institute (NRI), Serverworks, TIS (Sonic Garden), Toshiba, WingArc Technologies and Works Applications. 

ISV partners committed to supporting their platforms in the new location include Adobe, BitRock, Engine Yard, enStratus, Esri, IBM, Novell, Oracle, RightScale, Riverbed, SOASTA. 

All of Amazon's core services in Tokyo are available immediately.