Google has struck a deal to acquire cloud migration technology provider Velostrata, with the move set to give Google Cloud users an easier time migrating virtual machine-based workloads to and from the cloud.
Headquartered in Israel and founded in 2014, Velostrata has made a name for itself providing software solutions deigned to give companies accelerated cloud migration and workload mobility.
According to Velostrata co-founder and CEO Issy Ben-Shaul, the company was born after its founders saw enterprise customers struggle to unchain massive workloads from their data-centres and find a viable yet safe cloud strategy.
“To realise that vision, we assembled a core team of systems and WAN optimisation experts that had worked together for many years, and developed a breakthrough technology – real-time agentless workload streaming,” Ben-Shaul said.
While the value of the acquisition deal has not yet been made public, the Israeli company has reportedly raised over US$31 million from venture capital firms and other investors over the course of its relatively short life, according to media outlet TechCrunch.
Google Cloud engineering vice president Eyal Manor said in a blog post published on 9 May that, with Velostrata, Google Cloud customers are expected to see two important benefits – they’ll be able to adapt their workloads on-the-fly for cloud execution, and they can decouple their compute from storage without performance degradation.
“This means they can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud,” Manor said in the blog post.
“On top of that, customers can control and automate where their data lives at all times – either on-premises or in the cloud – in as little as a few clicks,” he said.
Broadly speaking, the acquisition, which remains subject to certain closing conditions, is expected to add to Google Cloud’s existing portfolio of migration tools designed to support enterprises in their journey to the cloud.
“That way, businesses can simplify their onboarding process to Google Cloud Platform, and easily migrate workloads to Google Compute Engine,” Manor said.
News of the deal comes just days after Google revealed it had become the latest cloud provider to announce the availability of Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs on Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine in beta.
According to Google product managers Chris Kleban and Ari Liberman, users can now select as many as eight Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, 96 vCPU and 624GB of system memory in a single VM (virtual machine), receiving up to one petaflop of mixed precision hardware acceleration performance.
