CIOs and data center managers who run large hybrid clouds worldwide have a good chance of hearing IBM knock on their doors in the next few months.
That’s because IBM is expanding its global data center footprint, opening 18 new “availability zones,” essentially large data centers, for its public cloud across the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Along with uptime service level agreements and high-speed network connectivity, users have gotten used to accessing corporate databases wherever they reside, but proximity to cloud data centers is important. Distance to data centers can have an impact on network performance, resulting in slow uploads or downloads.
For companies that manage complex, hybrid public-private cloud environments, IBM points to its decades of experience servicing large corporate workloads.
Eighty percent of the world’s data is sitting on private servers and it’s not practical or even permissible in some cases to move all the data to the public cloud, IBM noted Monday when it announced its data-center expansion. Up until the announcement, IBM had already been running 18 availability zones in six regions around the world.
What the IBM offers for hybrid cloud
“Our focus is very much obviously on the enterprise, it’s on our clients who have very traditional workloads that they’re looking to modernize over time as they infuse new cloud-native skills,” said Aki Duvvur, worldwide product manager for the IBM Cloud. IBM data centers can host data in multiple formats and databases including DB2, SQLBase, PostreSQL, or NoSQL, all exposed as cloud services, Duvver said.
“We have spent a lot of time and effort around our Kubernetes-based container platform and we’re taking advantage of common logging and common services between our on-prem environment as well as our public cloud environment,” Duvver said.
During the course of the year, Duvver said, IBM will make all its cloud services, including the Watson AI service, consistent across all its availability zones, and offer multicluster support — the ability to run workloads and do backups across availability zones.
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