Google works with IBM to bring IBM Power Systems to Google Cloud

Google announced a partnership with IBM to launch IBM Power Systems on Google Cloud, hoping to persuade more companies to migrate to the cloud.

Many of these workloads run on IBM Power Systems equipped with Power processors, and to date, IBM is almost the only supplier of cloud-based Power systems. But Google is now involved in this area through a partnership with IBM.

“Enterprises looking to the cloud to modernize their existing infrastructure and streamline their business processes have many options,” writes Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud’s corporate VP for its global ecosystem, in today’s announcement. “At one end of the spectrum, some organizations are re-platforming entire legacy systems to adopt the cloud. Many others, however, want to continue leveraging their existing infrastructure while still benefiting from the cloud’s flexible consumption model, scalability, and new advancements in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.”

Given that many companies are using Power Systems for mission-critical workloads based on SAP and Oracle, this approach clearly makes sense. This allows businesses to continue running these workloads and move them slowly to the cloud without having to redesign their applications and infrastructure. Power Systems on Google Cloud is clearly integrated with Google’s services and billing tools.

Because IBM has its own cloud product, it’s a little strange to see it partner with Google to introduce its own Power Systems in the latter’s cloud service, although it is certainly expected to use this to sell more Power servers. However, this move is indeed significant for Google Cloud, because Google Cloud’s mission is to bring more enterprise workloads to its platform. As businesses adapt to the Google Cloud Platform, they are likely to migrate other workloads to the cloud.

Via: TechCrunch