Dell offers on-prem storage integration with Google Cloud

About one year ago, Dell EMC announced a new on-premises offering called Dell Technologies Cloud, using the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure VXRail and VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware’s hybrid cloud solution that provides integration between public and private clouds.

This week, Dell rolled out a storage partnership with Google Cloud through the launch of a service called Dell Technologies Cloud OneFS for Google Cloud, designed to help organizations control data growth and ease the movement of files between their private clouds and Google Cloud.

OneFS for Google Cloud combines the Dell EMC Isilon file-storage appliance with Google Cloud’s analytics and compute services. It allows companies to access applications and move workloads as large as 50 petabytes in a single filesystem between on-premises Dell storage systems and Google Cloud. Citing its own benchmarks, Dell claims OneFS delivered sustainable read throughput of 200GB/s and write throughput of 120GB/s.

Dell’s pitch is that the offering lets customers connect their on-premises Isilon systems to Google Cloud without any technical changes to their apps, which, in turn, makes it easier to adopt a hybrid cloud model.

This will allow organizations to run high- performance file workloads in the cloud to take advantage of Google Cloud’s elastic compute, GPU instances, and analytics services without having to make any changes to their applications. Google Cloud has been a bit of a laggard behind AWS and Azure, but one area of strength has been Google’s AI, machine learning, and other high-performance computing services.

This is a big deal because cloud storage is one of the biggest causes of cloud sticker shock for enterprises. It costs a lot to transfer data in and a lot to transfer it out. Dell cites a recent report from Enterprise Strategy Group (which it appears to have funded) that file data often accounts for at least half of an organization’s on-premises data, and very little of it is stored in public clouds, primarily due to performance and scale limitations.

The OneFS file service is natively integrated with Google Cloud, allowing for predictable subscription-based pricing and guaranteed performance. Customers simply order it from the Google Cloud Marketplace, and once provisioned they can configure and manage their OneFS filesystems directly from the Google Cloud console. Customers receive a single monthly bill and support from Google while Dell Technologies experts manage the operations for you.

Dell’s other announcements focus on tightening its ties with VMware.