Sergey Nivens - stock.adobe.com
Google bolsters hybrid cloud proposition for enterprises through VMware partnership
VMware-Google hybrid cloud partnership should pave the way for enterprises to run their vSphere-based workloads on the search giant's public cloud platform with greater ease
VMware has added the Google Cloud Platform to the roster of public cloud providers its customers can use to run their existing vSphere-based workloads.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian confirmed the news in a blog post, in which he described the move as “another significant step” in his firm’s drive to bolster the enterprise appeal of its public cloud platform.
In recent years, this has seen the Google Cloud team roll out a series of data security and functionality improvements to its platform, and move to introduce industry-specific services.
Such moves have resulted in Google Cloud developing into an $8bn annual revenue run rate company that is growing “at significant pace”, as was confirmed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during a conference call to discuss its parent company’s second-quarter results earlier this month.
“Customers are choosing Google Cloud for a variety of reasons,” said Pichai on the call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Reliability and uptime are critical.”
He also made reference to the “flexibility” that organisations also need when moving to the cloud, so they can proceed in their “own way”.
While the VMware-Google partnership will go some way to supporting that, the firm also made strides into this area earlier this year through the emergence of its multi-cloud management tool, Anthos.
Kurian said in today’s blog post: “This brings customers a wide breadth of choices for how to run their VMware workloads in a hybrid deployment, from modern containerised applications with Anthos to VM-based applications with VMware in Google Cloud Platform.”
The technology tie-up echoes the hybrid cloud-enabling partnerships VMware already has with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
These are geared towards ensuring that the customers it shares with both firms can move their virtual machine-based workloads with relative ease between their on-premise VMware environments and the AWS, Microsoft and now Google clouds.
Read more about hybrid and multicloud
- The unveiling of Google Cloud’s Anthos multicloud management tool dominated many discussions at the firm’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, amid claims that it could change the face of enterprise IT for decades.
- Enterprise interest in multicloud deployments is on the rise, but with so many moving parts to take care of, will the benefits end up being too hard-fought to make it viable for most enterprises?
The Google-VMware setup is the creation of software company CloudSimple, whose flagship service is an all-flash, hyper-converged-based private cloud infrastructure that can be deployed within public cloud datacentres so users can run VMware technologies natively there.
The CloudSimple platform in this setup will make specific use of several pieces of VMware’s software-defined datacentre (SDDC) portfolio, including VMware vSphere, NSX network virtualisation tools and its vSAN virtual storage area network technology.
In the VMware-Google setup, the latter party will be responsible for selling the service to customers and supporting it, as is the case in the Microsoft-flavoured version of this arrangement.
Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of customer operations at VMware, said: “With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all of the familiarity and investment protection of VMware tools and training as they execute on their cloud strategies, and rapidly bring new services to market and operate them seamlessly and more securely across a hybrid cloud environment.”
