Google Cloud on Thursday introduced two new storage products, as well as an expansion of its Cloud Storage offering, to offer more resiliency and protection for customer data.
The new services are Filestore Enterprise and Backup for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Cloud Storage is being updated to let users select the regions of their choice for dual-region buckets. Google is also offering a new 15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in Cloud Storage.
“We need to make sure that, as more and more data comes to the cloud, we provide customers seamless availability and protection,” Guru Pangal, Google VP and GM of storage, said to ZDNet. “We can do some of these things because of the underlying technology right and the underlying technology that we use to manage our own global assets.”
Cloud Storage’s dual-region buckets are driven by Colossus, Google’s global distributed file system, and Spanner, a globally distributed database. A dual-bucket region provides a true single namespace (or bucket) that spans regions. It effectively lets developers can treat a continent as a single bucket.
Previously, Google Cloud assigned dual-region pairs for users to choose from. With an upcoming release, users will be able to select their own region pairs. The new option will give users the ability to tailor their dual-region bucket to their own requirements and use cases. So a financial company, for instance, may create a bucket across New York and Chicago. The new feature gains more value as Google adds more regions.
Meanwhile, Google is offering a new Turbo Replication option for dual-region buckets. This RPO replicates 100% of your data between regions in 15 minutes or less, backed by a Service Level Agreement.
Next, Filestore Enterprise is a new member of Filestore, Google’s family of fully-managed file
storage products. It’s designed for tier-one 1 enterprise applications like SAP that need to share files. It offers high-performance reads and writes, as well as high availability via synchronous replication across multiple zones in a region. If a zone within a region becomes unavailable, Filestore continues to serve data to the application without any operational intervention transparently.
Lastly, Google is offering Backup for GKE, a native GKE service that makes it easier to protect container-based data. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a managed Kubernetes service, “is a rocket ship for us,” Pangal said. “Customers are using it extensively because it provides very good application velocity. And what we are seeing is more and more of the workloads are becoming stateful workloads.”
As customers opt to run stateful applications in containers, it becomes more imperative to keep their data protected.
