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Google has launched a new “sole-tenant” node option for enterprises that want wholly dedicated physical servers to run their cloud workloads.
The option is targeted at organizations with strict regulatory compliance requirements and those that want better control over isolating cloud workloads that utilize computing resources, according to Google.
Sole-tenant nodes enable physical separation of the computing resources that are used to run workloads. Unlike typical virtual machines that run on shared physical hosts, sole-tenant nodes give an organization access to a whole host system for its own use.
“You can launch instances using the same options you would use for regular compute instances, except on server capacity dedicated to you,” said Google product managers Manish Dalwadi and Bryan Nairn in a blog June 7.
The sole tenant node option gives organizations the flexibility to deploy virtual machine instances with custom configurations. In other words, administrators will be able to choose any combination of CPUs, memory and storage they want for a particular virtual machine instance. A so-called Google placement algorithm will then automatically figure out an optimal location on a host machine to launch that instance.
Enterprise administrators will also have the ability to manually carve out portions of a host machine on which they wish to launch a virtual machine instance. “Instances launched on sole-tenant nodes can take advantage of live migration to avoid downtime during proactive maintenance,” Dalwadi and Nairn said.
Pricing for Google’s sole-tenant node is similar to the model that the company uses for its other cloud platform offerings. Organizations for instance get the same usage based pricing option that is available for Google’s other options. In other words, they pay on a per-second basis only for the sole tenant nodes they actually use.
As with other VM hosting options, enterprises will get discounts for sustained usage. They can also opt for the committed usage model, where enterprises commit to using a certain amount of cloud resources every month in exchange for deeply discounted prices.
The new offering expands Google’s ongoing efforts to make its cloud services more attractive to enterprises. The company is in a three-way race with Amazon and Microsoft for market share in the enterprise cloud space. Amazon Web Services has a comfortable lead over Microsoft and Google in the cloud computing services market. But Google and Microsoft have been growing their shares rapidly over the past several years.
In Google’s case, at least some of the momentum is the direct result of the company’s recent investments its cloud business. The company has been building and expanding data centers worldwide and recruiting staff to operate those data centers over the past several quarters. It has introduced literally hundreds of new cloud product features and struck up strategic partnerships with key enterprise players such as SAP.
Another important factor in this growth has been Google’s Office of the CTO—or OCTO in Google-speak—that was established two years ago. The OCTO team, comprised of former enterprise CTOs and Google’s own senior technology executives, has been working with enterprises to gather and understand customer requirements in order to ensure that the company’s cloud products and services are aligned with enterprise needs.
“Already, OCTO has had a huge impact on Google Cloud, and on the products and services it offers,” noted Will Grannis, founder and managing director of the effort in a June 7 blog. “By working closely with customers, we see their needs and bring that information back to product and engineering, showing them things that they wouldn’t necessarily see.”