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Bare Metal Solution in the Cloud
Google Cloud recently announced the general availability of its Bare Metal Solution in five locations (Virginia, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, and Sydney). The new solution enables customers to rapidly deploy digital infrastructure at global scale.
Although infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a well-established offering from cloud providers, customers continue to demand more flexibility for specialized workloads that don’t fit the standard mold. The answer is Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution, which employs NetApp’s industry-leading storage solutions. Bare Metal Solution fills the gap left by traditional IaaS offerings by delivering support for those specialized workloads.
Why Bare Metal Solution Rather Than IaaS?
In both models, cloud customers benefit from on-demand access to compute resources without having to make an upfront capital investment. The primary difference with Google’s new Bare Metal Solution offering is that customers can now acquire physical, dedicated systems with a cloudlike approach. Customers realize the full potential of servers, storage, and networking combined with the support, service levels, monthly billing, and on-demand flexibility that Google Cloud provides.
In response to customer demand for the Bare Metal Solution capabilities, Google Senior Product Manager Gurmeet Goindi, stated,
At Google Cloud, we believe in providing our customers with the right choices of computing environments that fit their workload needs, so we’re excited to expand the availability of our Bare Metal Solution. We’re also proud to partner with NetApp as a key data storage provider for the solution, leveraging their strong expertise in running enterprise-class applications.
With Google’s Bare Metal Solution, customers don’t need to be concerned about multitenant resource sharing, “noisy neighbors” in adjacent systems, or virtual servers running on a hypervisor. With the solution, they can use physical servers to install any OS, hypervisor, or applications for their specialized workloads.
Enterprise Reliability, Enterprise Performance
The applications that power modern enterprises, such as Oracle Databases, often require availability and performance that are difficult to obtain in the public cloud. It’s not just about having dedicated resources; it’s about running the Oracle Clusterware needed to achieve nonstop access to data. And it’s not about good performance, it’s is about many gigabytes per second of data processing, hundreds of thousands of I/O operations per second, and I/O response times measured in microseconds. All of this is readily available in a Bare Metal Solution, with real physical servers, NetApp® ONTAP® storage systems, and dedicated networking.
More Bang for the Buck
Dollar for dollar, a bare metal architecture can process more data than any other solution currently available. In today’s world of artificial intelligence, big data, and analytics, enterprises need all the data-crunching capacity they can get. NetApp SVP of Sales Rick Scurfield commented,
During a digital transformation initiative, customers routinely turn to NetApp for advice and solutions. Through these engagements we have identified that organizations must concentrate on delivering high levels of performance, reliable availability of services, enhanced security, and stability of an enormous portfolio of applications while still conducting business in a cost-effective and scalable environment. Without a doubt, the best way to achieve these results is through a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution. NetApp has partnered with Google for over 10 years, helping global enterprises adapt to ever-increasing volumes of data and the ever-growing complexity of applications. Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution further enables our customers to securely power their applications with the benefits of a cloud solution like never before. This solution, built with NetApp, means that database customers can take advantage of Google Cloud’s performant infrastructure and scale, as well as in areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning, backed by a strategic relationship built on business transformation and migration on NetApp infrastructure.
It’s All About Simplicity
For organizations that are considering running applications off premises, one major hurdle is security risks. Controlling risk is extremely important when the applications are mission critical and data intensive, such as Oracle Databases. The Bare Metal Solution offers an easier migration path, using OEM hardware that is certified to run multiple enterprise applications. This solution makes a closer “lift and shift” operation possible due to the reduction in legacy application refactoring, the ability to load custom operating systems, and having scalable hardware on demand. With the Bare Metal Solution, enterprise customers can use a similar infrastructure architecture, complete with the physical high availability, load balancing, and network security they’re familiar with in their on-premises deployments.
In discussing these advantages, NetApp VP of Global Sales Neil McGowan commented,
Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution makes it easier for our enterprise customers to seamlessly deploy hybrid-cloud and multicloud solutions. The innovative Bare Metal Solution matches NetApp’s cloud strategy for helping enterprises deploy ultra-high-performance digital infrastructure on a global scale. The combined strengths of NetApp and Google empower our customers to be in control of how their data is stored, organized, accessed, retrieved, and shared.
Google Cloud provides customers with a single, unified process for identity management, access management, governance, and administration across all Google Cloud-based applications and database instances.
Contact ng-GC-BMS@netapp.com to learn more about how NetApp and Google empower our customers to be in control of their data.
