Google Cloud will launch a new region in Los Angeles next month to better serve the media and entertainment industries located there.
Also on Wednesday, Google Cloud announced a new network attached storage (NAS) service and the general availability of its Transfer Appliance, the latter of which was designed to move petabytes of data to the Google Cloud Platform.
Google's news comes amid an increasing move by the telecom industry into cloud technology, both in order to provide services to customers as well as to leverage for network operations. Earlier this year, AT&T added Google to its NetBond for Cloud platform, a move that allows the telecom operator to move more enterprise workloads into Google's cloud. That effort stems from AT&T's multicloud strategy and follows the company's decision in recent years to exit the cloud and datacenter business itself, and to instead rely on partners like Google for cloud tech.
Verizon recently announced it had picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud provider. Verizon said it planned on moving 1,000 business applications and database systems over to AWS. Verizon's Oath division, which includes its AOL and Yahoo assets, also selected AWS as its public cloud provider.
Google's announcement comes on the heels of AT&T's purchase of Time Warner—another indication that the telecom industry is increasingly mingling with the media sector that Google is targeting with its new cloud expansion.
And Google's cloud expansion doesn't necessarily come as a surprise. Google is expected to spend up to $23 billion this year on capex, according to a recent Jefferies report, and a significant portion of that spending will likely be allocated to cloud infrastructure.
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The Los Angeles region is the newest Google Cloud member in the United States, joining Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina and Northern Virginia. Google Cloud now has 16 regions across 12 countries with more regions set to launch in the future in Hong Kong, Zurich and Osaka, Japan.
“Los Angeles is a global hub for fashion, music, entertainment, aerospace, and more—and technology is essential to strengthening our status as a center of invention and creativity,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, in a prepared statement on a Google Cloud blog. “We are excited that Google Cloud has chosen Los Angeles to provide infrastructure and technology solutions to our businesses and entrepreneurs.”
Google also announced the debut of Cloud Filestore, which is a managed NAS service. Cloud Filestore offers managed file storage for applications that require a file system interface and a shared file system. Cloud Filestore, which is a storage option on the Google Cloud Platform console, enables customers to stand up a managed network-attached storage setup with Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances.
Cloud Filestore, which is slated to be available in a beta release next month, looks to be very useful for media and entertainment companies that have large files to store.
“We’re especially excited about the high performance that Cloud Filestore offers to applications that require high throughput, low latency and high IOPS,” said Tad Hunt, product manager and Chris Talbott, product marketing, in a separate Google Cloud blog post. “Applications such as content management systems, website hosting, render farms and virtual workstations for artists typically require low-latency file operations, high-performance random I/O, and high throughput and performance on metadata-intensive operations.
"We’ve heard from some of our early users that they’ve saved time serving up websites with Cloud Filestore, cut down on (their) hardware needs and sped up the compute-intensive process of rendering a movie."
After announcing its Transfer Appliance server last year, Google said today that it's generally available in the U.S. As its name implies, the Transfer Appliance server was designed to move data to Google Cloud Storage.
The service comes in two configurations: 100 terabytes (TB) or 480 TB of raw storage capacity. Google File Transfer could be used to migrate data centers to the cloud, transfer data into Google Cloud for machine learning and analytics and move large archives of content to cloud storage.