Google Cloud Powers Up on IBM Power Systems - SDxCentral
www.sdxcentral.com /articles/news/google-cloud-powers-up-on-ibm-power-systems/2020/01/
Google has linked with IBM’s Power Systems to allow enterprises to more easily migrate workloads from their IBM-powered on-premises environments into Google’s Cloud. The move also furthers Google’s increasingly frantic push into the enterprise space.
The link allows IBM Power Systems to run as a service on Google Cloud. This includes IBM’s “AIX” or “i” operating systems or Linux running on IBM’s Power architecture. The system provides Google Cloud’s Private API Access technology that allows enterprises to access Google Cloud resources privately and IBM Power Systems resources to use private IP spaces.
The combo can be deployed through Google’s Cloud Marketplace, which allows users to take advantage of unified billing through Google Cloud. Google Cloud also handles customer support for the deployment.
IBM Power Systems typically run mission critical workloads such as SAP applications and Oracle databases in an on-premises environment. IBM provides various server products that can house its operating systems and applications.
“You can run enterprise workloads like SAP and Oracle on the IBM Power servers that you’ve come to trust, while starting to take advantage of all the technical capabilities and favorable economics that Google Cloud offers,” explained Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate VP for Google Cloud’s Global Ecosystem, in a blog post.
The service appears to compete directly with IBM’s own Power Systems Virtual Servers on IBM Cloud service. That mouthful is a self-managed, pay-as-you-go service that ties together IBM’s Power and Cloud environments.
Google’s Enterprise PushThe move also comes as Google has reportedly increased pressure on its cloud business to gain market share. Those reports suggested that Google’s management has set a 2023 deadline for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to become a top-two player in the market.
It’s an ambitious goal, to put it gently. While Google has been gaining, Amazon’s share of worldwide public cloud revenues has hovered around 40% for a few years, and Microsoft’s has increased to almost 20%, according to Synergy Research Group. For comparison: Google controls around 10% of the market.
However, Google has been planting seeds toward increasing its market share.
It hired former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian as its new CEO. While Oracle’s public cloud had been struggling prior to Kurian’s departure, its stronghold in the enterprise is legendary, largely because of its database software running in data centers. “[Kurian] was hired to bring that customer focus and building out the sales team to make the Google Cloud a more enterprise-geared offering,” said Sid Nag, VP of research at Gartner, in an earlier interview.
In his first few months as CEO, Kurian told The Wall Street Journal that he already simplified contracts for businesses instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach. He also put more predictable pricing in place, and said he intends to hire more Google Cloud sales and support staff. Then, at the annual Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, Kurian unveiled the company’s hybrid cloud strategy.
That strategy is based on Google’s Anthos platform that is designed to provide a single-point of control for workloads that sit in on-premises data centers or across clouds – including AWS and Microsoft Azure.
And Google CEO Sundar Pichai last year pledged to spend more than $13 billion in 2019 on data centers and offices in the United States. This included “major expansions” in 14 states and “tens of thousands” of new employees, Pichai wrote in a blog post. He added that “2019 marks the second year in a row we’ll be growing faster outside of the Bay Area than in it.” For comparison, in 2018 the tech giant invested $9 billion in facilities and hired more than 10,000 people in the United States. |
