HC3 Cloud Unity with Google Cloud Platform

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Today we announced HC3 Cloud Unity℠, a new partnership with Google that has been two years in the making. Both companies have committed significant resources and technology to make this happen, and we’re super excited to announce it

So what is it? Simply put, HC3 Cloud Unity puts the resources on Google’s cloud onto your local LAN. It becomes a component in your infrastructure, addressable locally, which your applications can interoperate with in the exact same way they would with any local system.

The impact on operations is significant. For example, this takes the concept of cloud-based disaster recovery to a whole new level, because again, those cloud resources are part of the local LAN. This means the networking nightmare that is typically present in DR is gone, and an application which fails over to the cloud resource will retain the same IP address that it had before — and all the other systems, users, and applications will continue to communicate with the “failed” resource as though it never moved.

This also enables you to think about DR in a completely different way. Usually we think of DR as “site failure” — and certainly that could hold true here. But, in addition, we can now think of using this type of cloud-failover for individual apps and not necessarily entire sites. Again, since those apps failover into the same LAN, retaining IP addressing, they will work in either location.

Those are two concepts, simplified networking and DR, that we think customers will gain immediate benefit from. In addition, those examples should point you to something very new and exciting: true hybrid cloud. With everything on the same network, an application which may use several VMs can have those VMs spread across both their on-premises systems and the cloud, without any change in configuration or use. Furthermore, moving an application to the cloud is as simple as live migrating a VM between on-prem servers, because from a networking perspective, the cloud is “on prem.”

To accomplish this we have combined technology with Google, and both sides have also introduced new tech. On the Google side, this uses the resources of their cloud combined with newly launched nested virtualization technology. On the Scale side, we are using the HC3 platform with Hypercore and our SCRIBE SDS layers, and have now added SD-WAN capabilities to automatically bridge the networks together into the same LAN.

The end result, in-line with all Scale products, is extreme simplicity. These cloud resources are there on your LAN. Any VM can access them, use them, and move in or out of the cloud without reconfiguration or cloud awareness. We know our customers are often running a wide mix of workloads, some of which may be older, legacy systems. Whether old or new, these apps can now run in the cloud with a simple click in the UI.

When we first were approached by Google two years ago, we both immediately saw the similarities of our platforms and approaches. From KVM to software-defined storage, there was a lot that was already “in alignment” that enabled our platforms to work so seamlessly together.

Delivering this type of hybrid cloud functionality is the road we’ve been driving our customers down for a long time. From first coining the term “hyperconvergence” in 2012, to now bringing customers into this cloud-converged environment, we will continue to innovate to meet customer needs while maintaining the ease of use and interoperability that is fundamental to the Scale platform.

@JeffReady

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/hc3-cloud-unity-with-google-cloud-platform/

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Here is the official press release for those interesting in the drier marketing copy:

https://www.scalecomputing.com/press_releases/2075/

Scale Computing Collaborates with Google Cloud to Remove Barriers to Cloud Computing with Hybrid Cloud Mobility
Scale Computing, a market leader in hyperconverged solutions, announced that it is working with Google to develop a hybrid cloud solution that makes it easy for organizations, including channel partners and MSPS, to move application workloads freely in the cloud or on-premises.

The new offering, called HC3 Cloud Unity allows an organization’s apps to use resources in the cloud and on-prem at the same time, and enables apps solely created for on-prem to now run on Google Cloud Platform.

HC3 Cloud Unity combines the private cloud capabilities of Scale’s HC3 hyperconverged platform, SCRIBE software-defined-storage, and new SD-WAN capabilities with Google Compute Engine, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering for Google Cloud Platform. HC3 also leverages Google’s recently released nested virtualization support.

With HC3 running both on-premises and in Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Unity creates a virtual LAN that seamlessly bridges an on-prem local LAN with the private virtual network on GCP. This allows IT organizations to connect to the cloud in real time from their on-premises infrastructure that combines storage, compute, and virtualization in a single solution.

“One of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption for IT organizations is the inability to move applications to and from the cloud,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing. “With HC3 Cloud Unity, Google and Scale have laid a massive two-way speedway across the HC3 clusters on-premises and HC3 on Google Cloud Platform. This network means organizations no longer have to use or create different apps for the cloud, they can utilize their apps created for on-prem to run in the Google Cloud, which will be a game changer of end users, channel partners and MSPs globally.”

“Companies still have a lot of legacy applications built with a different set of tools,” said Adam Massey, Director, Strategic Technology Partners, Google Cloud. “The challenge is finding ways to work in a hybrid environment as you migrate and figure out what to retool and what to just pick up and move. Our work with Scale Computing is making this process easier for companies that haven’t been able to leverage the cloud to its full potential.”

“IT agility is what helps our company retain a competitive edge in our industry. One of the biggest hurdles we had yet to overcome was the ability to fully embrace the costs and flexibility of the cloud,” said Mike O’Neil at HydraDyne. “A solution that helps us move legacy applications and virtual machines back and forth from the cloud when we need it is a complete game changer.”

Scale Computing’s HC3 platform that was launched in 2007, brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. The company currently has over 2000 customers globally.

Google Cloud Platform is an IaaS that supports the HC3 platform and virtual machines and applications that run on HC3. With HC3 running both on-premises and in Google Compute Engine, IT organizations can connect the cloud with on-premises infrastructure like never before.

Cloud Unity is available in Q4 2017.

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It has been a busy week over here with so much going on in the news with our big Google partnership announcement. A little write up in Channelnomics this week:

https://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/3018371/scale-computing-ceo-pushes-partner-advantages-of-google-collab