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Today’s topics include IBM announcing a major expansion of its regional cloud services, and Cisco and Google making their hybrid cloud platform available by October.
IBM, which has invested over $3 billion in its cloud business, is planning to launch 18 new availability zones for the IBM Cloud in high demand centers in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. They will come online in either IBM owned-and-operated data centers or in colocated centers throughout the summer and into the fall.
An availability zone is an isolated instance of cloud inside a data center region, with independent power, cooling and networking to strengthen fault tolerance.
Clients also will be able to deploy multizone Kubernetes clusters across the availability zones via the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, simplifying how they deploy and manage containerized applications and adding further consistency to their experience.
At the Cisco Live 2018 show earlier this week in Orlando, Fla., Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins touched on the need for networks to offer a seamless link between a customer’s data center and the multiple public clouds they use while providing security in both on-premises and cloud environments.
At the event, Robbins and Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene provided an update on the partnership the two companies announced last October to develop a hybrid cloud platform that leverages technologies that each company contributes. The platform has now moved into the early access phase, with plans to expand the program in the coming weeks.
Robbins claims it will become generally available by October. Greene said the companies are anxious to move more of their businesses to the cloud but are challenged by the complexity. The idea behind the Cisco-Google Cloud partnership is to help make the migration easier, she said.