IBM has announced plans to launch 18 availability zones for IBM Cloud in six major regions, including the United Kingdom.

The American multinational tech company have said that the announcement is primarily focused on the geographical expansion of their cloud footprint.

IBM Cloud already operates in nearly 60 locations, but the availability zones expansion enables more capacity and capability in those centres.

It’s all part of the company’s new approach to deliver a full stack of public cloud capabilities and make them more available, redundant, and geographically dispersed.

What is an Availability Zone?

An availability zone is logically and physically isolated within a region that has independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure isolation from other zones, strengthening fault tolerance by avoiding single points of failure between zones.

Every availability zone IBM provides will enable clients to have a consistent set of IBM Cloud services, ranging from infrastructure to AI.

Clients who use IBM Cloud will be able to deploy multizone Kubernetes clusters across the availability zones via IBM’s Cloud Kubernetes Service.

IBM Cloud Availability Zone Dallas, Texas
Dallas, Texas is one of many cities that will benefit from IBM’s Cloud Availability Zone expansion. Credit: Pixabay

Where are the Availability Zones Being Placed?

There are other regions that are planned to have availability zones including North America (Dallas, Texas and Washington DC), Europe (Germany), and Asia-Pacific (Sydney and Tokyo).

Customers who use the the company’s cloud console will use other services including IBM Cloud Object Storage, Containers, and other Platform as a service (PaaS) services.

Andrew Hately, Vice President, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect at IBM Watson and Cloud Platform highlighted that IBM’s availability zones expansion provided a more robust infrastructure foundation for future offerings.

“In the IBM Cloud regions, we’ll be bringing a consistent set of IBM Cloud services from infrastructure to data to serverless to AI capabilities in the offering portfolio as well as resiliency for the platform.

“By abstracting physical locations and providing additional underlying redundancy, we’re able to roll out new capabilities like Virtual Private Cloud networking (which was also announced in beta today) for IaaS services,” Andrew said in the blog post.

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