GCP – Bare Metal Solution: Coming to a Google Cloud data center near you

Last November, we announced Bare Metal Solution, which lets businesses run specialized workloads such as Oracle databases, close to Google Cloud, while lowering overall costs and reducing risks associated with migration. Our next job was to make this solution global. Today, we’re announcing availability of Bare Metal Solution in five more regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Frankfurt; London; Los Angeles, California; and Sydney. By the end of this year we plan to launch four more sites: Amsterdam, São Paulo, Singapore, and Tokyo. Keep an eye out—Bare Metal Solution is coming to a Google Cloud data center near you!

Enabling specialized workloads in Google Cloud

Bare Metal Solution is designed for the performance and high availability needs of mission-critical, enterprise-grade applications. To deliver that, Bare Metal Solution offers state-of-the-art dedicated servers based on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) that come in a variety of sizes. Depending on your needs, you can choose a Bare Metal server with as few as 16 cores, or all the way up to 112 cores with 3 terabytes of DRAM, all to handle your most demanding workloads. These servers are certified by almost all major software companies. We deploy Bare Metal Solution in a region extension with less than two millisecond latency to Google Cloud; in most cases we measured the latency to be sub-millisecond.

One key aspect of any enterprise workload solution is storage performance and high availability. Bare Metal Solution leverages some of the world’s most advanced NVMe based storage that is fully tuned to provide a target level of IOPS and throughput out of the box. In addition, automated snapshots help provide data protection. 

Setting up networks can sometimes be an obstacle to deploying your enterprise applications quickly. Bare Metal Solution leverages our Partner Interconnect framework, delivering routing that’s pre-configured and optimized for your use case. This makes complex tasks such as setting up replication across sites a matter of a few clicks.

With these features, Bare Metal Solution helps to make moving your workloads from your data center to Google Cloud a simple and quick task, while lowering overall costs and reducing migration risk. 

CloudBees, a leading provider of continuous delivery software services, recently used Bare Metal Solution to speed its migration to Google Cloud. “Google’s Bare Metal Solution provided us with ease of migration, and integration with Google Cloud services with little or no disruption to our current business processes. We are pleased with our experience with Bare Metal Solution—allowing us to easily leverage cloud-native databases.” – Francois Dechery, Chief Strategy Officer, CloudBees 

Built with a little help from our friends 

Bare Metal Solution leverages Google Cloud’s rich partner ecosystem to deliver important core functionality and optional add-on features. For example, Bare Metal Solution employs NetApp storage solution to support enterprise-class applications. Using NetApp’s NVME storage technology provides enterprise-grade performance, while its industry-standard snapshot technology helps enhance Bare Metal Solution’s data protection capabilities. 

Our partner Actifio will provide add-on features to support backup and recovery. Actifio provides an integrated video of all of your data assets across Google Cloud in addition to a backup catalog and policy-based backups and restores. Actifio’s approach to copy data management reduces storage and software costs while lowering your time-to-recovery in the case of an outage. To learn more, please see Actifio’s blog post.

In addition, Atos is delivering its Atos Database Hotel on top of Google’s Bare Metal Solution as a managed service for enterprise customers, providing organizations with a fully managed and secure cloud service, seamlessly integrated with Google Cloud, and leveraging Atos’ end-to-end orchestration, management, and infrastructure services.

Taken together, we believe the mix of industry-leading technology and our partners’ expertise to enhance Bare Metal Solution can lower your implementation timelines and improve your overall user experience. 

Furthering our commitment to open source 

While developing Bare Metal Solution, we felt a responsibility to provide a differentiated experience to enterprise customers, in the form of an automation tool pack to help manage your specialized workloads, assist you with deployment, and help manage day-to-day functions such as backup. Using open-source Ansible IT automation, we created a toolkit to help you quickly install your databases, manage storage and set up your backups, and have made this toolkit available to everyone as open source on GitHub. 

In summary

We at Google Cloud remain committed to building a cloud that meets and exceeds your expectations. Bare Metal Solution represents another step in that direction, helping to lower the cost of running enterprise workloads, reducing the risks associated with cloud migration, and making you the driver of your modernization journey. 

To learn more tune in to the Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir session, Business Continuity with Oracle in Google Cloud, and visit the Bare Metal Solution website.