In what is apparently the first official Microsoft Azure region announcement of 2022 Microsoft has announced plans for a data centre in Hyderabad, India. It has also opened a new facility in China.
There’s no timeline for the development yet, but it is clearly a big investment. According to The Economic Times news service, Microsoft has acquired three land parcels in the area – 22 acres in Mekaguda, 41 acres in Shadnagar, and 52 acres in Chandenvelly.
Reports have been circulating that the company was looking to develop a facility in the area – where it already has a large Development Centre – since last year. Microsoft opened three Indian cloud regions – in Pune (Central India), Chennai (South India), and Mumbai (West India) – in 2015.
The Data Centre Dynamics website says that in December 2021 Microsoft added three availability zones (three unique physically separated locations or ‘zones’ to provide higher availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery protection) in the India Central region in Pune. This is the only Indian Azure region with availability zones.
The company has also announced a new Azure region in China. Its fifth Chinese Azure region – in North China – launched on 1 March. It will be operated by local partner Vnet (previously 21Vianet).
Along with the new region, Microsoft has said it will be launching availability zones within its Chinese regions in 2022, along with Digital Twins, Arc and MySQL.
Microsoft is planning to open four more Chinese data centres by early 2022 according to a report in June last year from Bloomberg.
Azure regions and availability zones are designed to help customers achieve resiliency and reliability for their business-critical workloads. Each Azure region features data centres deployed within a latency-defined perimeter.
