Google Antes Up Its Own Cloud Migration Appliance

Google is bringing its own data transfer appliance for cloud migration

When we talk about the cloud migration hen the toughest challenge to overcome is to ensure reliable and consistent migration methodology. Moving databases and data centers are not an easy game even for the proficient administrators. This is faced by almost all the major companies and new start-ups when they are trying to build new application or make use of new data residing in the cloud. Data migration between two points is always seen as tough egg to break due higher costs and huge time consumption this is where cloud vendors come into the play.

Remedy for data to cloud migration problem

The problem faced in the cloud migration is quite incomprehensible even with modern technologies at disposable. If a person has 10 Gbps connection then transferring petabyte of data from any data center will consume as many as 12 days to put it on the cloud. In the old golden days companies used to Sneakernet in the sky wherein a pile of data is loaded on a secure disk and it is shipped off to any of their cloud vendor. Microsoft Azure made use of this system for quite some time before a new system came into being called Snowball and this method is also used by the Amazon AWS. This doesn’t mean that sending secure disks to the cloud vendor has become obsolete.

Google is moving into the enterprise cloud migration business

The tech giant is getting into the enterprise cloud business on a serious note but quite specifically in the migration appliance space. In this end of the business the consumer arc is very similar to online shopping portal. User goes online, orders the device and this particular device is made available for definite set of time after which they have to send it back to the provider.

Cloud migration market is buzzing with immense order in the one petabyte category therefore Google is introducing two models with size of 100 and 480TBytes. On other hand its competitors Amazon tends to work in lower end of the spectrum with 3 models with data size of 50, 80 and 100 TBytes units. Amazon is way ahead in the field of data transfer and it has developed a number of solutions for high end data migration with Amazon Snowmobile wherein it brings a 12 wheeler 45-foot container for transferring 100 PBytes of data.

Pricing will be a key to grab a piece of the cloud migration market

Google is mainly focusing on cornering market for the petabyte cloud migration. Therefore it has brought on par pricing with Snowball for the smaller 100 TByte units and in order to make migration appliance more appealing to the users by keeping it 35% below the rival offerings. When it comes to design Google is going for plug-in based form and function while Amazon brings self-standing units.

However Google has revealed many details of its devices, service offerings, capabilities and benefits but it seems like it is eagerly looking forward to give stiff competition to market leaders namely Amazon and Microsoft Azure.