A better way to migrate your storage-rich apps to Google Cloud

Battle-tested and widely adopted, VMware workloads have long been at the heart of on-premises apps. For greater agility and for disaster recovery, enterprises are increasingly shifting their VMware workloads to the cloud. However, for storage-heavy workloads, customers may encounter compatibility obstacles that compromise this strategy. A collaboration between NetApp, VMware, and Google Cloud is making this migration to the cloud easier.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the general availability of NetApp^® Cloud Volumes Service as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. Now you can easily scale and protect your virtual machine (VM) data by using NetApp ONTAP^® data management software with a fully managed service in Google Cloud. This service enables you to move data-rich VMware workloads to the cloud without sacrificing performance or data management. Cloud Volumes Service is based on the same NetApp ONTAP software that’s trusted in data centers worldwide.

NetApp provides a common data layer across on-premises and hyperscaler environments, and now extends that support to VMware datastores. NetApp is the first cloud storage service provider certified and supported as an external datastore for VMware on Google Cloud. The VMware and NetApp co-development partnership has brought innovative solutions to 20,000 joint customers.

According to Narayan Bharadwaj, vice president of Cloud Solutions, VMware, “Google Cloud VMware Engine is being adopted globally across a variety of industries by customers looking to accelerate their enterprise cloud transformation. One thing we’ve consistently heard is that these customers want more options for storage decoupled from compute. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service datastore support for Google Cloud VMware Engine will help these customers lower their total cost of ownership and get more enterprise workloads into Google Cloud faster.”

You benefit from the combination of NetApp’s storage expertise, VMware’s innovation, and the extensive scale of Google Cloud. Together, we’re focused on getting you to the cloud quickly and painlessly.

“We’re excited to offer customers this flexible path to move enterprise workloads to the cloud,” said Manoj Sharma, director of Google Cloud VMware Engine Product Management. “Using NetApp Cloud Volumes Service datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine reduces operational overhead and lowers the cost of migrating and managing VMware applications. Customers can extend their existing investments in VMware—using the same tools and processes—while enhancing agility, security, and availability.”

A prominent European retailer agrees. The company is using Google Cloud VMware Engine as part of their cloud strategy, mostly for lift and shift of legacy VMs from on premises to Google Cloud. “The addition of Cloud Volumes Service datastores enables us to increase or reduce storage space, independently from compute. We can even access NFS datastores from our on-premises VMware vSphere, which allows the migration of VMs by Storage vMotion,” said the retailer’s team lead for servers and storage. “We’re happy with the performance and in more than six months of usage have not had a problem,”

Deploying VMs with Cloud Volumes Service improves data management and offers extra protection while optimizing vSphere resources. Cloud Volumes Service is a fully managed cloud storage service that frees you from much of the day-to-day data management that enterprise workloads require. With storage that complements Google Cloud VMware Engine, deploying and running virtual workloads has never been easier.

Sophisticated data protection, privacy, and compliance capabilities are readily available through the service. Easily create NetApp Snapshot™ copies for quick checkpoints and data protection. Unlock file-sharing capabilities among VMs and applications running in Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Compute Engine. Customers with additional security requirements can easily enable customer-managed encryption keys for their datastores on Cloud Volumes Service. For a closer look at the improved data management and security features of Cloud Volumes Service, see my earlier post.

Data-intensive workloads compound the need for enterprise-class storage. Moving complex datasets to the cloud brings the challenge of balancing storage and compute. Some VMware workloads use more cloud storage than CPU or memory, requiring users to provision more nodes to get this additional storage. This skews overall costs and gives pause to many who are considering VM migrations to the cloud.

By scaling storage independently of compute, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service can save up to 30% of the cost of running typical VMware workloads in the cloud.^{”NetApp Cloud Volumes Service and Google Cloud VMware Engine total cost of ownership estimator,” February 2023.}Estimate your savings with a TCO calculator that combines the VMware and Google Cloud sizers.

Now you can take advantage of elastic demand with true cloud flexibility that meets the needs of your critical workloads. Optimize storage-heavy vSphere workloads on Google Cloud, knowing that you can dynamically scale storage with Cloud Volumes Service when you need to handle bursting or disaster recovery scenarios.

There’s never been a better time to deploy and run your enterprise apps on Google Cloud. Finally, you can get your data-rich VMware workloads to the cloud without sacrificing performance, availability, or your budget—and with NetApp, you’ll be able to do it without retraining your staff, refactoring workloads, or introducing new processes.

Schedule a 1:1 session with one of our specialists to discuss your NetApp VMware use cases and start getting more value from the cloud.

To learn more, visit our VMware on Google Cloud overview.