Google, Scale Computing partner for easier hybrid cloud deployment

Google has partnered with Scale Computing, developer of infrastructure software for hyper-converged systems, to make it easier to deploy Google Cloud Platform as a backup for your own data center. 

The two companies have created a platform called Cloud Unity, which integrates Scale’s HC3 software environment with Google Compute Engine. HC3 is a cluster software product that merges server, storage and virtualization into a single appliance for easier converged infrastructure. 

With HC3, you can build a cluster using Google’s infrastructure instead of buying your own, thus creating a backup of your own data center in Google’s data centers. Cloud Unity creates a SD-WAN connection to your existing Scale environment, so the Google-hosted cloud version of your data center appears as just another cluster on the same LAN. It uses a VXLAN encryption between your site and Google’s data center. 

The service is expected to launch in the fourth quarter. 

Google expands its hybrid cloud positioning 

The deal shows Google is broadening its stance from a pure cloud play toward the hybrid cloud. For most of its cloud business history, Google has gone the pure cloud play, while Amazon and Microsoft offer pure public cloud as well as hybrid cloud. But that’s changing with this deal and with a recent partnership with Nutanix, another hybrid cloud vendor. 

For its part, Scale serves the smaller and mid-sized market more than large enterprises, and these are underserved markets that could use all the help they can get because they don’t have the resources to manage a complex cloud deployment. 

This partnership means those firms now have a cheaper, viable option for backup and disaster recovery than the pricier options that exist now. It will save firms time and money, which can be put into new deployments rather than maintaining old systems. Also, there is no need to deploy a disaster recovery system that winds up sitting idle for almost all of its time.

Being a smaller player that competes with giants such as HPE and VMware, Scale uses the open-source KVM hypervisor for its virtualization. With so many companies using VMware, it will be interesting to see if it can make a dent in the installed base.