Continuing its bid to capture a greater share of the market for enterprise hybrid clouds, IBM Corp. today announced the launch of 18 new “availability zones” for its Enterprise Cloud across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Availability zones are isolated regions within existing data centers with independent power, cooling and networking, along with built-in redundancy and a suite of application development tools and operational platforms that enable customers to build and operate software in a private cloud setting. The offerings include new data centers in the southern U.S., Washington, D.C., Japan, Frankfurt and London.

The zones are intended to give enterprises high-speed connectivity and the ability to isolate workloads in particular regions, a requirement that has taken on greater importance with the launch of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. They run on a handful of the 60 existing IBM Cloud data centers that offer basic infrastructure as a service.

“Think of it as an availability architecture,” said Aki Duvvur, vice president of worldwide cloud platform offering management at IBM. “Availability zones provide greater bandwidth, sub-two-millisecond connectivity and everything from infrastructure to artificial intelligence.” Each zone will boast more than 1 terabit of collective bandwidth, he said.

Among the 170 services offered are container support, function-as-a-service, IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix) platform as a service and database engines such as MongoDB, Redis and IBM’s Db2 database management systems. Enterprises can federate multiple availability zones and treat them as one big data center with backup and failover between them.

“The idea is to have no single point of failure in terms of your connectivity to the zone,” Duvvur said. “If you want to leverage all of the end-to-end cloud services stack with low latency, then an availability zone is the best option.”

In conjunction with the announcement, IBM said three large enterprises and are in the process of migrating core workloads to the IBM cloud. Exxon Mobil Corp. has adopted IBM as the foundation for its Speedpass+ mobile app which is used at 11,000 gas stations across the U.S.  Bausch & Lomb Inc. will operate its Stellaris Elite cataract surgical system out of IBM data centers in Dallas and Frankfurt and Australia’s Westpac Banking Corp. has migrated to a secure and dedicated IBM Cloud infrastructure. Both the Bausch & Lomb and Westpac contracts were driven, in part, by the need to comply with strict new privacy laws.

IBM reported $17.7 billion in annual cloud revenue in 2017, reflecting a mix of public, private and hybrid cloud sales and software-as-a-service offerings.

Image: IBM