IBM Cloud expands its VPC operations in Dallas, Texas

Everything is bigger in Texas—including the IBM Cloud^® Network footprint. Today, IBM Cloud opened its 10th data center in Dallas, Texas, in support of their virtual private cloud (VPC) operations. DAL14, the new addition, is the fourth availability zone in the IBM Cloud area of Dallas, Texas. It complements the existing setup, which includes two network points of presence (PoPs), one federal data center, and one single-zone region (SZR).

The facility is designed to help customers use technology such as generative AI, confidential computing, massive in-memory databases, high-volume web applications with dynamic traffic peaks, and other enterprise-grade cloud computing workloads.

“The new state-of-the-art DAL14 expansion zone is a testament to our VPC growth—providing additional capacity for our clients in the Dallas region—and a commitment to our delivery of advanced networking solutions,” said Jay Jubran, Director of IBM Cloud Product Management Infrastructure Services. “Investing in our data centers gives our customers the peace of mind for the ability to expand their workloads in IBM Cloud.”

IBM Cloud VPC is a highly resilient and highly secure software-defined network (SDN) on which you can build isolated private clouds for your business operations while maintaining flexible, public cloud benefits. You choose your compute, storage and networking resources and IBM Cloud provides the maximum availability and hyperscalability.

Let’s quickly review the basic concepts of regions and zones as they apply to IBM Cloud VPC deployments.

Region: A region is an abstraction that is related to the geographic area in which a VPC is deployed. Each region contains multiple zones, which represent independent fault domains. A VPC can span multiple zones within its assigned region.

Zones: As shown in Figure 1, a zone represents the physical data center that hosts compute, network and storage resources—along with the related cooling and power—and provides services and applications. Zones are isolated from each other to eliminate shared single points of failure, improve fault tolerance and reduce latency. An availability zone is designed to make applications and databases highly available, fault tolerant and scalable.

Like the number of enterprises moving to Texas, the Texas data center industry has also been growing, and it doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon. Moder Intelligence values the Dallas data center market at 419.64 MW this year and projects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.7% to 941.92 MW over the next five years.

Market trends in the report highlight COVID-19, hyperscalability requirements, hybrid cloud demand and the rising popularity in AI as a few of the boosting factors for cloud computing demands in Dallas.

As data generation grows in Dallas across industries such as financial services, telecom, healthcare and government, IBM Cloud aims to further expand its networking presence in the area as needed by customers and business partners.

DAL14 will also be home to the entire IBM Cloud VPC portfolio. Each cost-effective option is purpose-built for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and hybrid cloud needs, such as x86 with 4th Gen Intel^® Xeon^® processing power, VMware, SAP and IBM Z^®.

For instance, the new multizone region (MZR) location will host IBM Cloud Virtual Servers, a portfolio with recent news on adopting Intel^® Gaudi^® 3 AI accelerators. It will also support IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC, IBM Cloud Block and File Storage, IBM Cloud Direct Link and more. The entire portfolio spans globally, with seven total MZRs and 18 availability zones built to spec for quick access, low-cost migration, low latency and certified security.

As clients and businesses continue to move to Dallas and other metro areas in the greater southwest region, IBM Cloud remains committed to helping them drive innovation with resiliency, performance, security and compliance at the forefront.