IBM has announced the opening of its first IBM Cloud Multizone Region (MZR) in Latin America. Building on its existing data centre footprint in Brazil, IBM says that the MZR is a result of the company's continued investment in cloud infrastructure to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption and help foster business growth in Latin America.
In 2019, according to the website Data Centre Dynamics, IBM had one data centre in São Paulo. Plans to extend it to an MZR in 2020 to offer customers reliable web services got delayed, not too surprisingly given the pandemic.
The region finally went live this year with two new data centres, also in São Paulo, but the centres are on three separate sites. An MZR is composed of three or more zones that are independent from each other to ensure that single failure events affect only a single zone.
IBM expects to have customers from financial services, government and telecommunications, among other sectors, and has already announced some significant customer wins in Brazil, including footwear and accessories firm Arezzo & Co, fintech firm Stone, and Digisystem, a Brazilian technology company, all of which have migrated some or many of their solutions to IBM’s cloud. IBM now has eight MZRs around the world.
Not to be outdone, or so it seems, Microsoft has announced Azure Availability Zones (AZs) for the south of Brazil in São Paulo State. AZs allow customers to spread their infrastructure and applications across discrete and dispersed data centres for added resiliency and high availability.
The announcement is part of Microsoft's ‘More Brazil’ plan, which also includes training and support for cloud migration, as well as help meeting security and compliance regulations. The company has also promised to expand its zone coverage during 2021.
Microsoft opened its first data centre in Brazil in 2014. The country now has multiple Microsoft ‘zones’ (or data centres), geographically separated, and with independent power and cooling, but close enough together that customers can improve reliability by setting up redundant backup to multiple zones.