Amazon Launches Three Cloud Data Center Sites in Ohio

Amazon has launched three data center sites in Ohio, adding a second US East availability region for the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Each of the new Amazon data center sites is in a different location within the state, representing a separate availability zone within the region. A single zone can consist of one or more data centers. That means users can design their applications to switch from one data center to another in case of an outage.

This is the latest major cloud data center location to come online in a recent burst of expansion by internet giants vying for share of the cloud services market, where AWS is far ahead of its competitors. Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Google, are spending billions of dollars every quarter as they build out the global infrastructure to support these services.

“We’ll continue to add new infrastructure to grow our footprint and make AWS as useful as possible for all of our customers around the world,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wrote in a blog post announcing the Ohio region.

There are now 38 Amazon cloud data centers across 14 regions, 16 of them in five regions in the US, and the company has already announced it is building nine more in four additional regions – Canada, UK, France, and China – expected to come online “in the coming months,” according to a news release.

Microsoft, which currently has 30 operating cloud availability regions, has announced six upcoming ones. Google said last month it had eight locations in the works to add to the five it has today.

Read more: Amazon, Google Detail Next Round of Cloud Data Center Launches

Like most of its rivals, Amazon has a mixed data center sourcing strategy, both leasing data center facilities and building its own. In Ohio, it used the latter approach. Vadata, the Amazon subsidiary that oversees its data center construction projects, negotiated tax breaks and land deals in the towns of Dublin, Hillard, and New Albany, according to earlier news reports.

Not only will its cloud customers be able to set up redundancy within the Ohio region, they’ll also have the option to extend application topology between Ohio and the first and largest AWS region in Northern Virginia. The company is offering low data transfer rates between the two regions to enable this, according to Vogels.

By enabling redundant, high-availability topologies across Amazon data centers, the company is courting more enterprise customers to the cloud service, from both private and public sectors. All cloud giants are aggressively courting enterprises, who are reportedly in the early innings of deploying large critical applications in the cloud instead of their own data centers.

Last week, Amazon announced its biggest step yet in pursuit of the enterprise cloud market, partnering with VMware, whose infrastructure management software is present in most of the world’s enterprise data centers. VMware will soon sell its software as a service available on AWS, promising seamless integration between the world’s biggest cloud and customers’ on-premise VMware environments.

Read more: VMware Gives AWS Keys to Its Enterprise Data Center Kingdom

To offset carbon emissions associated with grid energy its data centers consume, Amazon has been making utility-scale power purchase agreements with developers of renewable energy projects. In Ohio, it contracted with EDP Renewables, a company building a 100MW wind farm in Paulding County to buy the project’s entire energy output.