Google Cloud Expands Availability of Bare Metal Cloud Solution

As bare metal cloud solutions grow more popular, Google Cloud has made its platform, introduced last November, available in five more data center regions.

Users in Ashburn, Virginia.; Frankfurt; London; Los Angeles; and Sydney now have access to Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution. By the end of the year, look for Asterdam, São Paulo, Singapore and Tokyo to join the list.

Google’s Gurmeet Goindi Sr.

Google’s technology allows managed service providers and other partners to provision public cloud services directly on dedicated physical servers. Even though there is no virtualized infrastructure, organizations get to run specialized workloads using opex budgets. In a June 29 blog, Gurmeet Goindi Sr., a product manager for Google Cloud Platform, cites Oracle databases as prime candidates for the company’s Bare Metal Solution.

The idea is that Bare Metal Solution moves workloads from organizations’ data centers to Google Cloud, and does so easily. This can even include hauling legacy applications into the cloud – traditionally a daunting feat.

Google Cloud built its platform with technologies from a range of partners, including NetApp, for storage; Actifio, for backup and recovery; and Atos, for orchestration, management and infrastructure services. Altogether, “Bare Metal Solution can lower your implementation timelines and improve your overall user experience,” Goindi wrote.

On the details front, Bare Metal Solution servers use second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) that come in various 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,” Goindi wrote. “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.”

Google Provides Administration, Maintenance and Billing

Google Cloud administers and maintains the infrastructure, from compute, storage and networking to power, cooling and facilities. The vendor also provides unified billing across Google Cloud and Bare Metal Solution, which should prove a helpful selling point for the channel.

Further, Google Cloud has released an automation tool pack to help organizations – or their channel partners – manage specialized bare metal cloud workloads.

“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,” Goindi said.

The timing on Bare Metal Solution seems prescient on Google Cloud’s part. Research firm Technavio predicts the bare metal cloud market will grow by $7.89 billion over the next five years. In 2019, North America represented the largest bare metal cloud market in the world.

“The increasing adoption of secured cloud services will significantly drive bare metal cloud market growth in this region over the forecast period,” analysts wrote in a June 2020 summary of the report, “Bare Metal Cloud Market by End User and Geography – Forecast and Analysis 2020-2024.”

Of the forecast growth, 39% will originate from North America, analysts noted, and mostly within the United States.

“The shift from capex model to opex model is one of the key factors driving the bare metal cloud market growth,” analysts wrote. “Several companies are focusing on using flexible IT solutions because of the rising cost pressure. The demand for bare-metal cloud services is increasing among end-user industries because it is based on the opex model, which does not have any fixed upfront cost as compared to capex model. The client will only pay for what they use on a monthly or hourly basis.”

Industries that stand to benefit the most from bare metal cloud include banking and financial services, government, IT and telecom, and health care, Technavio said.