Microsoft Corp. Powered on the first availability zones for its Azure cloud platform last week, providing new backup and reliability options for customers running workloads in their data centers in Iowa and Paris. The move follows an announcement last year that the company introduced availability zones in the preview. In a blog post, Tom Keane, Microsoft's Head of Global Infrastructure, said the regions of Iowa (US Central) and Paris (France Central) are each three times available
Availability zones are a failover feature. They are isolated and fault-tolerant locations in a data center region, each with its own power source, cooling and network infrastructure to protect against outages in their respective regions.
Businesses using cloud services are increasingly realizing that these capabilities are critical to the performance of mission-critical workloads. The availability zones not only guarantee availability, but also help keep data in case of major problems.
Previously, Microsoft offered so-called redundancy protection within its availability rates. It also provides isolated virtual machines within its data centers to isolate individual workloads from hardware failures, and region pairs that match VMs across two regions within the same geographic area to protect against natural disasters such as earthquakes.
Microsoft's rivals, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Inc. and Oracle Corp., have been providing availability zones for some time now, meaning the Redmond-based company, Washington, is catching up.
Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said the addition of availability zones to Microsoft is long overdue. Nevertheless, the company has the opportunity to accelerate the growth of its cloud platform. At a time when companies are under increasing pressure to abide by new privacy rules, such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, he said.
"The number of availability zones now provides Microsoft with a great opportunity to leverage the data retention and privacy requirements required for Azure growth, especially with the DSGVO in the wings," said Mueller.
In his blog post, Keane did not explain why it took Microsoft so long to add these new features. His comments, however, indicate that the company wants to catch up with its rivals quickly.
"In the future, we are committed to bringing Availability Zones to additional regions so customers can create a comprehensive data continuity business continuity strategy," Keane said.
The board added that Microsoft has an advantage in that its availability zones provide an "industry-leading" 99.99 percent service level agreement when virtual machines run in two Availability Zones in the same region.
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