Storage Vendors Race to Share in the Google Next '19 Spotlight

Storage vendors are doing their best to be seen and heard this week by introducing products that coincide with the barrage of Google products and services being unveiled at Google Cloud Next ’19. Many of the new products are designed to be used in conjunction with Anthos, the rebranding of the Google Cloud Services Platform. Anthos is now available on both Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Elastifile, a file storage vendor focused on the cloud, announced Elastifile Container File System for Kubernetes (EKFS). EKFS is designed to work with GKE On-Prem, which helps organizations run container workloads on premises. EKFS is scale-out, enterprise-grade file storage, which is often used in Kubernetes deployments. It will allow developers to more easily use containers to deliver hybrid clouds.

Cohesity, a hyperconverged secondary storage vendor, announced Cohesity Cloud Backup Service for Google Cloud, a SaaS backup and recovery solution for applications running on Google Cloud. The software integrates snapshots with GCP for native backup of Google Compute VMs and is integrated with GCP’s Identity and Access Management offering, which helps eliminate the risk of users gaining access to resources they aren’t permitted to use.

Finally, Robin.io, whose software-defined, application-aware storage solution is built for Kubernetes, has announced that it has developed a standardized API for data management capabilities required for running data-centric workloads in GKE. Called Anthos Storage API, it allows for application-level snapshotting, backup and cloud portability specifically for running stateful workloads in GKE.

At this point in the evolution of cloud and storage, it makes sense for vendors to align themselves with Google, said Greg Schulz, president of consultancy StorageIO.

“Google needs more third-party partners, and vendors need to add cloud platform support other than Azure and AWS,” he said. “And it’s also part of meeting a growing trend of customers wanting to use the same storage software on public clouds as they do on site, as well as multi-cloud.”