0:12

Hey, everyone,

0:12

and welcome to episode three nineteen

0:15

of the weekly Google Cloud Platform Pod

0:17

webcast. This is Stephanie Wong.

0:19

And today, I'm here with

0:21

Drumroll, please. Stephanie

0:24

Wong. Yes.

0:26

You are all in for a treat because it's just

0:28

me here today hosting, but

0:31

hey, I'm here on every other week

0:33

or so anyway. And, you know, I think

0:35

my teammates needed a well deserved break.

0:38

They're either in the heat wave of California

0:40

that we just had and they're out on a pool.

0:43

or they went to Burning Man

0:45

or they just plain wanted to take extra

0:47

few days off with Labor Day so I don't blame them.

0:50

but we have some great content up here today.

0:52

We I, I should say, just

0:54

had a great conversation with Sean and Nishant

0:57

who are the product leads for our

0:59

storage products. And

1:01

if you're thinking storage really

1:03

well, we had a lot come out. We just had a storage

1:06

launch day or storage spotlight, if

1:08

you will. It's this event online. And

1:11

they both had some great presentations about some of the

1:13

biggest launches of this year so far.

1:15

And so they're here today to talk about

1:17

any and all things storage, block storage,

1:19

object storage, storage for GKE.

1:22

There's a lot going on, so we're gonna get

1:24

them in here in just a second. But

1:26

of course, Even though it's just me today, I'm not

1:28

gonna skip out on the cool things of the

1:30

week.

1:36

First cool thing in the week is something that

1:38

I cannot cannot forget to mention.

1:41

Google Cloud Next is happening. Yes.

1:43

virtually still, but

1:46

it is open and available to register

1:48

for online at cloud dot with

1:50

google dot com slash next slash

1:52

register yes, we're gonna have that link in the show

1:54

notes as well or just search CloudDEX

1:57

register. And you're gonna be able

1:59

to, for free,

2:01

join us live online along

2:03

with one million builders, dreamers,

2:06

leaders for Googled Next two

2:08

thousand twenty two, and we're all gonna learn and grow

2:10

together to Take on what's next.

2:12

Again, access is complementary. I am

2:14

going to be in a couple of the sessions. I'll

2:17

let you know in just a little bit about which ones

2:19

those are, but yeah, definitely don't miss it. We

2:21

have more launches on top of what we were talking

2:23

about today for the storage. Now, I

2:25

have

2:25

two other cool things because it's me and I can do

2:27

whatever I want today. So my

2:29

next cool thing is a really awesome

2:31

blog post by one of our

2:33

developer advocates for DataFlow.

2:36

Dataflow is one of our data analytics

2:39

tools for batch and streaming.

2:42

And dataflow recently announced the general

2:44

availability support for Apache beams,

2:47

generic machine learning prediction and inference

2:49

transform. It's called run inference.

2:51

So in this blog post, they take a deeper dive

2:54

on that transform capability.

2:57

And you're gonna go through a

2:59

actual full blown Example and walkthrough

3:01

of how you can use run inference to

3:03

transform and remove large chunks

3:05

of boilerplate data pipelines that incorporate

3:07

machine learning models. So

3:09

take a look at that. It's very detailed.

3:12

And if you are in the data engineering world,

3:14

you're gonna love this because it will span your capability

3:17

to be able to do machine learning in production.

3:19

And then the last cool thing of the week that

3:22

I wanna mention is just a fantastic

3:24

blog post written by Forrest Brasil. He's

3:26

ahead of content here. He actually had

3:29

me featured in one of the videos that

3:31

I wrote about how to get into cloud from

3:33

non traditional backgrounds, but that is

3:35

just one video in series. There

3:37

are a bunch of videos talking about how you

3:39

can get into cloud from IT. how you can

3:41

get in cloud from help desk and

3:43

how you can get into cloud without a degree.

3:46

Priyanka did that video along with forest

3:48

and couple others in our team.

3:50

So definitely don't forget to check that out. If you're

3:52

interested in getting a career in cloud, these videos

3:55

give you some actual tactical tips.

3:57

Forest has a lot of background in this area. So check

3:59

out the blog post

3:59

for a series of them. Alright.

4:02

Well, that's enough cool things from one person, I would

4:04

say. So Let's go ahead and dive into our conversation

4:06

about storage with Sean and

4:08

Nishant.

4:13

Sean and Nishan,

4:15

thanks so much for joining for another

4:17

exciting

4:18

storage launch day. Thanks, Stephanie.

4:20

It's great to hear back on the show. Hard to believe

4:22

it's already been a year. Yeah. Thank you, Stephanie,

4:24

for having us.

4:25

Yes. We've had Sean on last year for

4:27

the inaugural storage spotlight. And this

4:29

time around, we're having the second time around,

4:32

none less exciting than last year. Now, Sean,

4:34

I know this is your first time on the podcast, but why

4:36

don't you start with giving us a

4:37

quick intro of what you do here at Google, and then I'll pass it

4:39

back to Sean to do the same. Sure. Thank you, Stephanie.

4:41

Yeah. I'm one of the outbound product managers

4:43

for our Google Cloud Storage product.

4:45

So excited to be on and love to

4:47

chat about key exciting things we're announcing.

4:50

like

4:50

I said, Stephanie, it's great to be here in the storage

4:52

product management team here as well looking across

4:55

our portfolio of offerings. And as you said, we've got

4:57

a number of exciting announcements that we just made

4:59

last week.

5:00

we have a storage spotlight day.

5:02

If you all listening haven't checked it out, definitely

5:04

go ahead and take a listen. We've had

5:06

you both do some talks there and so

5:08

those are up on demand, and we have those links

5:10

in the show notes. But storage, why

5:13

are we talking about storage? Because we're

5:15

talking all the time about these services and

5:17

products that are coming out in the cloud. That

5:19

store just sort of automated and taken care of

5:21

for you in some cases. but it's still

5:23

so hugely important for a company to

5:26

really keep top of mind. So from your perspective,

5:28

Sean, why storage? Why are you in

5:30

the storage space? Storage

5:32

is one of those unsung heroes,

5:34

if you will. Everybody needs it, and not

5:36

everybody unfortunately thinks about it from the beginning.

5:38

And one of the great things about Google Cloud is

5:40

that we have a lot of experience

5:42

of delivering massive scale applications,

5:45

Continental even global scale applications, I think

5:47

YouTube and Gmail, etcetera, which is

5:49

all really finding good. And that's all built

5:51

on our cluster file system colossus.

5:54

This is just a ridiculously large capacity.

5:56

Can't even mention how big it is, but it's just like,

5:58

as big as you're thinking it's bigger than

5:59

that. Right? This is a foundation that we've been running

6:02

applications on for years. This is

6:04

now the same basis, if you will, the same technology

6:07

that we're now building solutions that enterprises

6:09

can use for their business. And it's a different delivery

6:11

model of Google delivering a service

6:13

to an application versus delivering

6:15

a storage service that enterprises can

6:18

consume whether it be blocked, file, or object, and we'll get

6:20

into some of those details. But this is all just

6:22

crazy technology stuff that really is

6:24

something that can be thought of an afterwards

6:26

in terms of I'm just gonna subscribe to so much performance

6:29

or capacity and really take advantage of a

6:31

managed service. However, there are a lot of nuances

6:33

that have to come into play when you design

6:35

a continental scale application that

6:37

there are differences and things you have to think about

6:40

with storage. As easy as we're trying to make it,

6:42

we're not done yet. And that's some of the things that we're gonna

6:44

talk about a little bit.

6:45

Yeah. I mean, to have a storage day

6:48

dedicated to is a testament to how much

6:50

exciting stuff is happening in this space. So

6:52

what about from you and Sean? No, I think

6:54

Sean kind of summed it really well. It is on

6:56

Sun Hero, but it does need

6:59

storage to function everything, especially

7:01

I kind of talk about storage in the sense of

7:04

working on human generated data and that's

7:06

transformed into non machine generated

7:08

data and the volume of data that's being generated

7:10

is far exceeding what we can manage. So

7:13

having capacity at scale and

7:15

a continent scale is a key attributes

7:17

that definitely excites me. I've been in

7:19

the objects store industry for over decade

7:21

plus and I don't think we're going anywhere

7:24

slower. It's just going faster and faster. kick

7:26

talks of the world and other capabilities generating

7:29

more content that we can store. So

7:31

I think that just keeps us exciting out in our

7:33

capability wise and especially focus in the enterprise

7:35

space. Yeah.

7:36

Just from a consumer standpoint, when I think

7:38

about how I'm constantly paying a little

7:40

bit more, when I have more Google photos,

7:43

backing up all my photos. I'm like, how is this trend

7:45

gonna keep continuing for Eons into

7:47

the future? So it's a big problem space,

7:49

and I'm sure in the last decade, you've seen it change

7:51

in the industry. so much from a technological standpoint.

7:54

So we have these launches this year.

7:56

Can you talk about some of the themes that we've

7:58

been focusing on since

7:59

last year's storage day? What have

8:01

we been

8:02

really doing in this space? Sean?

8:04

We've really been focusing on optimization.

8:07

This is clearly as you'd expect from product development

8:09

active. These don't happen overnight. Right? So this is

8:11

really long term planning that we've had in place

8:13

about how customers can optimize their environment.

8:16

And

8:16

that's optimizing not only the cost,

8:18

but also storage utilization and performance,

8:20

and how do we optimize their own resources? because

8:23

as you started off by asking about, it's just

8:25

a managed service. that's true, but somebody

8:27

still has to check a few boxes,

8:29

make a few mouse clicks, type in a few commands.

8:32

So, of course, we still have ways to go to make it

8:34

even easier than what we have been doing today. And

8:36

so as we talk to customers, there are really kind of

8:38

three overall pillars that we are

8:40

focusing on. That's number one, enterprise readiness.

8:43

companies that are gonna bring applications into

8:45

Google Cloud, how are we gonna deliver

8:47

enterprise scale applications, both in

8:49

terms of reliability, and file store

8:52

enterprise is an example with four nines of

8:54

regional SLA availability for those critical

8:56

applications like SAP and even GKE.

8:59

or high performing applications need

9:01

with files to high scale, where you have high

9:03

performance computing workloads that need

9:05

twenty six gigabytes per second of throughput

9:07

for that, or improving our block storage

9:09

with persistent disk extreme. So

9:11

there are things that companies just have to do to kind

9:14

of run of the mill, if you will, the day to day things,

9:16

but there are also a lot of the data driven application

9:18

and they're consuming all that storage you're

9:20

referencing for the photos and so forth with

9:22

cloud storage enhancements for analytics. And

9:25

if you look at what we've done to make it

9:27

easy for companies to deliver continental

9:29

scale applications with our dual

9:31

region option for cloud storage where

9:33

they can replicate between nine

9:35

different regions across three continents, all

9:38

to a single bucket, and all to the same API

9:40

access regards to storage class. is something

9:42

that's unique to cloud and unique to Google cloud.

9:44

And this is one of the things that we're doing for

9:47

availability of those applications in addition

9:49

to making sure that they can not only have a recovery

9:51

time objective of zero to be all failover for

9:54

one region in a single bucket to actually

9:56

add that option to replicate the data

9:58

what we call turbo replication with a fifteen

10:01

minute RP0

10:01

Right? So you have an r two of zero

10:04

and RP0 of fifteen minutes for

10:06

petabytes of capacity or tens of petabytes

10:08

of capacity is just unfathomable.

10:10

And then lastly, really around storage everywhere.

10:12

So this is really the notion of yes,

10:14

a lot of applications are coming to Google

10:16

Cloud, but there is still an edge presence

10:19

on premises. And that's where our

10:21

Google distributed cloud edge appliance comes into

10:23

play where you have companies like neuro

10:25

that have distributed on premises

10:28

workloads. They have their autonomous

10:30

driving vehicles collecting data all day.

10:32

They pull into the shop, they upload the data, the appliance,

10:34

and it's really a transition into getting that data

10:36

into the cloud for further training in

10:38

AI ML workloads. And it's not a transfer.

10:40

Now a one time transfer is more of a daily occurrence,

10:43

and so it's bridging that cloud

10:45

boundary, if you will, down to the customer's

10:48

data center.

10:49

while wrapping your head around what you just said,

10:51

twenty six gigs of throughput needed and

10:53

also having storage options with a fifteen minute

10:55

RPO for petabytes of data. Can we

10:57

just sit with that for a second? Because it is pretty impressive.

10:59

Just thinking back to where we've started when it

11:01

comes to storage, like, when the first storage

11:03

area networks were developed and where we

11:06

are today with having multiple users and

11:08

the type of latency needs that we have

11:10

today,

11:10

it's quite impressive. And and

11:13

Stephanie, those are the things we talked about largely

11:15

last year and have delivered just this year. So we're not even

11:17

talking about the new stuff this year's story spotlight

11:19

yet. This is all things that we've been we've been

11:21

busy this year even ahead of the announcements last

11:23

week. So I think

11:24

that's a perfect segue because I was gonna ask about some

11:26

of the key launches and what are

11:28

we talking about this year? Maybe start

11:30

with things that kind of fall into the enterprise readiness

11:33

space.

11:34

It's really around I would characterize it as a block

11:36

storage. Right? If you take the typical application, I'm gonna

11:38

run SQL Server, I'm gonna run SAP

11:41

and Google Cloud, how would it make it easier

11:43

for customers to optimize their deployment? so

11:45

that's where we announced the next generation of persistent

11:48

disk called Hyperdesk. So

11:50

Google Cloud Hyperdesk is really the option

11:52

that gives customers three levers to

11:54

turn, if you will, iOPS throughput

11:57

and capacity. And so you're going to

11:59

start to see this

11:59

rollout next quarter in Q4 this year.

12:02

particularly focused on the higher end workloads

12:04

as it'll be called hybridistic stream. As the

12:06

name implies, it's gonna be Phil's most demanding

12:08

database workloads where you've got

12:10

to get the sizing right. Right? Coming back to the what

12:13

you said opening, Stephanie, about sizing

12:15

application that what makes storage interesting is

12:17

that people have to think about it from the beginning. And

12:19

historically, They've gone through a long planning

12:21

cycle about iOPS and trying to figure out what

12:23

the application is gonna need from the

12:25

business, not only in day one, but also

12:27

day three sixty five. and how does that change

12:30

over time? And so with HyperDisc, we're really giving

12:32

customers that option to optimize and

12:34

make it easy to provision iOPS throughput

12:36

and capacity on day one, but as the

12:38

application changes over time, tune

12:40

those knobs. Make those adjustments as needed without

12:43

going through lot of arduous tasks of

12:45

migrating data around. And the other

12:47

is really around files to enterprise with GKE.

12:49

You know, we're seeing more and more stateful workloads

12:51

running in Kubernetes, and that

12:53

really depends upon availability

12:56

of data because

12:56

you can't have a stateful workload that

12:58

you can't number one backup or have

13:01

multiples pods have access to the same

13:03

data. right, for failover and availability reasons.

13:05

And so now that same four

13:07

nine SLA of regional availability with file

13:10

store enterprise, we've brought to GK

13:12

already, but now we're actually optimizing how

13:14

customers can maximize a storage utilization

13:17

and carve up hundred different shares of capacity

13:19

for hundred pods to be able to write

13:22

to the same data at the same time. And

13:23

that really changes the way customers and the flexibility

13:26

that gives customers to deploy stateful

13:28

workloads in GKE? Yeah,

13:30

that's been an initial challenge I think

13:32

with containerized environments as having to have these

13:34

modularized architectures that need to

13:36

access the same storage in order to have state

13:39

full applications be deployed on Kubernetes. So

13:41

it's like we've matured a lot in

13:43

this space, and storage has been a huge part

13:45

of that calculation. Nishan, is there

13:48

anything else that tested

13:49

out to you in this storage day for enterprise

13:51

readiness? Oh, yeah. There's a lot of citing stuff

13:53

that we've introduced in our cloud storage

13:55

world. And Sean talked about just volume

13:57

of data that we have to manage now. Customers

14:00

are taking advantage of our cloud stores at a confident

14:02

scale, but at the same time, they're worried about

14:05

cost. So the three pillars that we

14:07

talk about cost performance and capacity.

14:09

One of the key aspects is cost. How do I

14:11

manage my cost at billions and trillions

14:14

of objects or petabytes at

14:16

bytes of data. That seems to be a daunting

14:18

task for our customers. And often, they

14:20

don't know what workloads are coming

14:22

to our object stores. They're just

14:24

turning applications or bringing in applications

14:26

from business use case perspective. So

14:28

managing that whole aspect of

14:31

what application create what kind

14:33

of workload and managing what data should

14:35

go and what class of storage tends

14:37

to be pretty daunting. So we are now introducing

14:39

what we call our auto class capability

14:42

for cloud storage, where it's really

14:44

our easy button. You click it and forget

14:46

it and set it. And now based on your

14:48

access patterns, we'll ensure that

14:50

their data is sitting in the right storage class

14:53

based on your access, and we'll make sure

14:55

that we're optimizing your costs along the

14:57

way. So a lot of our customers have to

14:59

start to figure that out at a get go where

15:01

they have to understand the application workload

15:04

and start to plan that. And so we

15:06

wanna take that planning away or

15:08

have to reduce that aspect of

15:10

planning. So autoclaves really

15:12

helps sets us apart from our competition

15:15

and also helps our customers. Now

15:17

I think of it in two ways. We do

15:19

give our customers flexibility to

15:21

be the what we call the advanced users.

15:24

Do it yourself. They can build their own

15:26

patterns and usage and decide which

15:28

storage class they wanna retain the data in.

15:30

that's perfectly fine. So you continue

15:33

having those advanced users, but the ones

15:35

that just wanna have simplicity and

15:37

ease but still manage their costs on

15:39

their behalf, and Autoclast does that

15:41

for them. So from that perspective, the

15:44

capability gives them a great

15:46

scale. but also the flexibility of

15:48

just simplicity that we can provide. It'd

15:51

be hard to achieve that on your own.

15:52

And I have a lot of thoughts about what you said because

15:54

when it comes to cost optimization with storage,

15:57

we actually had an episode on FinOps,

15:59

which is a kind of growing area, especially with

16:01

regards to cloud. And So it's this intersection

16:03

between finance and operations. And so

16:06

the more that we can automate these things and do

16:08

these recommendations and activists' related

16:10

features we have to optimize your

16:12

storage, which is can be a larger operational

16:15

burden for OpEx. This is great.

16:17

I mean, I haven't seen it across industry,

16:19

and I think you just mentioned it might be one of our unique

16:21

launches this year or two, so that's super exciting.

16:24

And when it comes to the fifteen minute turbo

16:26

replication and having multi regional single

16:29

buckets. I heard this phrase the

16:31

other day. It's like when starts are thinking about

16:33

choosing a cloud provider, choose a provider

16:35

and first start to think about multi region,

16:37

not multi cloud. And that's what you really

16:39

need to prioritize when it comes to having

16:42

that enterprise readiness and availability

16:44

before you start to think Okay. Let me just choose across

16:46

all these providers. It's like, can we get

16:48

one that really gives us the capability to be multi

16:50

region?

16:51

Spot on and And then lastly, another

16:53

amazing feature that you introduced is really

16:56

around our storage insight. Now when we talk

16:58

about the volume of data you're generating,

17:00

As much as we can automate, there are certain aspects

17:02

we cannot. So we do want to give

17:04

insight into the customer what type

17:07

of data they're storing. So our initial launch

17:09

of storage insight is gonna be ging this

17:11

year or early next year as well, which is

17:13

giving them knowledge of what capacity they're

17:15

storing. In those trillions of objects?

17:18

What kind of data are they storing? Can we give

17:20

them the visibility into that? Are there

17:22

any patterns in that storage data

17:24

that they can then facilitate And also

17:26

other aspects could tie into you talked about

17:28

fan ops and compliance space. Customers

17:31

are looking at insight of what type of data

17:33

I'm showing in my buckets. Am I

17:35

giving access to customers that shouldn't

17:37

have access to that data? Should that data

17:39

not be publicly accessible? There could be

17:41

PII data in there? So really all

17:44

those aspects, giving our storage and site

17:46

service to begin with, can give them

17:48

kind of directional guidance, not just

17:50

from a managing capacity perspective,

17:52

but managing information. So we really

17:54

wanna grow from, of course, pod

17:56

storage. It's all about storing data at massive

17:59

scale, but we wanna get to managing information

18:01

for our customers and then giving them insight

18:03

how they can operate their business better,

18:05

how they can manage their application better,

18:08

how they can optimize their application for

18:10

best workload. So for example, they

18:12

have analytical workloads. We talked about

18:14

dual region, how we can co locate compute

18:17

and storage together. So getting that

18:19

depth of knowledge from their data, they can then

18:21

decide what's the right storage class

18:23

for them or right storage operations

18:25

they wanna do and cool features and functionalities

18:28

that we're introducing when to set it.

18:30

And then also thinking about from a security

18:32

perspective, some of the challenge we've heard

18:34

from our customers hey, am I managing

18:37

all my data across with the right

18:39

keys, encrypted keys across the board? Are

18:41

we rotating them enough? So Having

18:43

that global policy level

18:45

of information across all their buckets is another

18:48

key attributes that they can take advantage from our storage

18:50

insight service. there's

18:51

a lot happening clearly. And recently,

18:53

we just had an episode on GKE because they

18:55

just turned seven. And we have much

18:57

more exciting features coming out with that product,

18:59

but I know you were talking a little bit about what

19:01

we have for storage when it comes to GKE

19:03

Shawn. What are we announcing around

19:05

GKE and the theme of storage everywhere?

19:08

Yeah.

19:08

Happy belated birthday to us. Right, Stephanie?

19:10

Yeah. So I talked about

19:12

files to enterprise. So that's kind of on the storage

19:14

side for those stateful workload deployments. But the

19:16

other part that goes along with this is have

19:19

to be able to recover an application that you really care

19:21

about. If you can't recreate the application or

19:23

the data easily, you've got to back it up. Right?

19:25

And we've been doing this for long time in

19:27

VMware on prem or GCVE in

19:30

Google Cloud or GCE. But

19:32

now we're actually delivering this for Kubernetes.

19:34

And this

19:35

is actually something that is it's our

19:37

own development. We developed this to

19:39

be integrated directly within the cloud console.

19:41

So now you've got a couple mouse clicks choose

19:43

which workspaces or pods you wanna protect,

19:46

where you wanna protect them locally or in another

19:48

region. And then in the recovery side, you have

19:50

that same granularity of I'm gonna recover

19:52

everything. I'm gonna recover portion of my

19:54

environment. And you really have to

19:56

have that forward thinking about protecting

19:59

the applications having the file

20:01

store data being available across multiple

20:03

pods for availability. We're

20:05

using persistent disk with GKE.

20:07

Right? You back up that data with backup for GKE.

20:09

And so it's a really changing of a mindset

20:11

about being able to run more and more different

20:14

applications that are typically more important,

20:16

if you will, in terms of stable, but not necessarily.

20:18

but it really is supporting that customer journey

20:20

throughout their transformation and optimization process

20:23

because not every customer is gonna go directly to

20:25

GKE. They're gonna have a portion of things that are gonna

20:27

run-in VMs. and others are gonna be running

20:29

containers. Yeah.

20:30

That's a good point. It's usually very much so

20:32

heterogeneous environment, and so it needs to be

20:34

adaptive in terms of being able to support these

20:36

different deployments. So I know

20:38

we mentioned security just a moment ago

20:41

with storage insights, but is there any more you

20:43

can talk about when it comes to the security of

20:45

data?

20:45

yeah, it really comes back to the heterogeneity.

20:47

You mentioned Stephanie in that backup for

20:49

GKE is obviously protecting that environment.

20:51

However, you've got to think about everything else.

20:53

and this is where we're announcing Google Cloud

20:56

for backup and DR. This is also now

20:58

directly integrated into the cloud console.

21:00

For those of you familiar, this is from the Actifio

21:02

acquisition. that we made little bit ago,

21:04

but now it's fully managed service. So there's

21:06

nothing else for a customer to install. Just

21:08

point click, which applications you wanna protect,

21:11

where you wanna protect them and what that policy looks

21:13

like. And so for GCVE with

21:15

VMware or GCSE and VMs,

21:18

databases and applications, we can now protect

21:20

applications running in the cloud consistently. You

21:23

have the protection for GKE applications. So

21:25

you're really providing that consistency for

21:27

security and data protection. across

21:30

all of the environments, across the heterogeneous deployment

21:32

you're mentioning. But then the other thing that with

21:34

backup and DR that we're announcing is

21:36

that, yes, the in cloud protections there,

21:38

But if you're running VM or on premises, you

21:41

can use the same capability to protect those

21:43

VMs on premises and back them up to Google

21:45

Cloud. So as you're thinking about

21:47

the potentially a hybrid deployment and

21:49

a migration strategy of what's gonna be moved when

21:51

into Google Cloud, you have that option to backup

21:53

from on prem to the cloud within the cloud?

21:56

You

21:56

have options. Yeah. I love it.

21:58

We talked a little bit about cost optimization

22:01

earlier in the conversation, but I wanna circle back

22:03

to it just because I know storage, as I mentioned,

22:05

such a fundamental building block, but there's

22:07

also ballooning storage, which we said, and

22:09

that comes with ballooning cost and OpEx

22:11

especially in today's age is tightening up for a

22:13

lot of companies. So what are we doing to help with

22:15

cost optimization?

22:16

Yeah. So I would say couple of things,

22:18

Stephanie, on the operational side. Nishan

22:21

talked a little bit about auto class where we've

22:23

now given them the easy button, if you will. So

22:25

they only can apply this auto class policy

22:27

to an entire bucket very simply.

22:29

And that can manage billions or trillions of files

22:32

and move data down. And if you think about

22:34

the cost of standard all the way down

22:36

to archive, Archive

22:37

is a fraction of the cost of standard.

22:39

And as cheap as cloud storage is,

22:41

if you're taking, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty percent

22:44

the cost of standard, that's a significant cost savings

22:46

over time. Right? that's number one. Number two,

22:49

I've talked about hyper disc and how giving

22:51

customers three knobs to turn between

22:53

IOPS throughput and capacity. so they

22:55

can right size that. But then also, we're introducing

22:57

storage pools for hyperdesk. And this

22:59

is gonna be the notion of, think

23:02

of thin provisioning now in the cloud.

23:04

So we've done this on premises for years where

23:06

you provision block storage and you over provision

23:08

and you actually are using less physical storage.

23:11

Same notion here. We're now giving customers that

23:13

flexibility. to optimize the storage utilization

23:16

with hyper disc and storage pools so

23:18

that they can actually, as you'd expect, save

23:20

some money and and actually rightsize how those

23:22

applications are consuming storage. And then also

23:25

with with file store enterprise and multi shares,

23:27

carving up file store instances to

23:30

be more granular and more increase that storage

23:32

utilization with smaller shares

23:34

just helps to right size again those pod deployments.

23:37

with GK.

23:38

Very nice. I love the themes of rightsizing and

23:40

auto classing. This is a trend

23:42

that is definitely super valuable.

23:45

And of course, I know that for many

23:47

of our lunches, we don't do this alone.

23:49

We take so much feedback from

23:51

our customers to help guide where we wanna

23:53

take the products next course.

23:54

This is not an exception. So

23:56

were there any customer use cases and stories

23:58

that you have from some of these

23:59

launches? Yeah.

24:00

No, Stephanie. That's valid many launches

24:03

we have prior. We do work with closely with

24:05

our customers. And similarly here, we'd be DevIS

24:07

is one of our customers that they're in the research

24:09

industry. They aggregate research data, and

24:11

then they provide that to the end user or the applications.

24:14

They're from analytics perspective or

24:16

research aspect perspective. And

24:18

one of the challenges that they generally have

24:21

is they don't know when that research

24:23

data is important. Now, they have to

24:25

retain that data forever. but

24:27

in early stages of research that data

24:29

is fairly active, but then eventually becomes

24:31

dormant. So they wanna be able to have some sort

24:34

of capabilities, i e, auto class, And

24:36

based on the access patterns where they don't have

24:38

to continuously pull the users, are you done

24:40

with this data? Just migrate or move

24:42

that data to the right storage class and

24:45

start saving them costs. And

24:47

one thing that struck us when we were talking

24:49

to them is it's more about human

24:51

failure or accidents that happen

24:53

where when we do move the data

24:56

to the lower storage cost,

24:58

but, you know, when you access that data,

25:01

it starts to to hear more

25:03

cost to you because there's operation

25:05

charges there. So with our auto class capability,

25:07

we automatically move that data to standard

25:09

storage and ensure that on subsequent

25:12

reads, you're not paying that heavy penalty

25:14

of retrieving that data. So not only

25:16

we're automating, getting used to the lowest

25:18

cost tier, But at the time of access

25:21

and when you wanna get that data, we'll

25:23

move it to the right storage class or the more

25:25

of the hotter storage class and ensure that you

25:27

can use that data at any given time.

25:29

Throughout this whole thing, you know, the application

25:32

doesn't need to change. It's a single API.

25:34

And even at our lower cost

25:36

storage, the latency to read that data

25:39

is milliseconds. So from the end

25:41

user perspective, they don't have to change their architecture.

25:44

They don't have to change their application. They

25:46

get the same functionality they were getting

25:48

regardless of what storage class are sitting in.

25:50

So from their perspective, it

25:52

made their life as a storage admin

25:54

or the owner of the infrastructure, so

25:57

much simpler that they can then focus

25:59

those engineering resources in the

26:01

part of the business that mattered is really

26:03

collecting that research data. One

26:05

of the things the customer said once this

26:07

thing is GA and ready to go, they

26:10

expect ninety percent of their data will be managed

26:12

under this capability. So which is huge

26:15

saying from their perspective, and I think they

26:17

can take huge advantage of this capability as

26:19

it comes out. Yeah.

26:20

No. That's amazing. I was gonna say that

26:22

I'm sure the red flag that people

26:25

weigh when they hear out of close. That sounds great,

26:27

but if it's gonna affect how easily

26:29

I'm going to be able to pull that data

26:31

back down, if there's cost differences,

26:33

if it's gonna be difficult for my application

26:36

to be compatible with such differences,

26:38

and that's gonna be a big decision factor.

26:40

But if it's easy and seamless, then

26:42

why not? Right? That's

26:44

great. So Can you step

26:47

back real quick, Sean, and summarize some of

26:49

these launches and where they fit into our broader

26:51

portfolio to help

26:53

our customers secure their data, simplify

26:55

operations, and optimize the cost.

26:57

If you take a look at what we've done, it's really across

26:59

the portfolio of the storage that we have.

27:02

lot of different applications are gonna come to the cloud,

27:04

Not everything is gonna be leveraging object storage.

27:06

Not everything is gonna be leveraging block storage. So

27:08

you have to really think about what we can do to optimize

27:10

deployments as customers are thinking about their enterprise

27:13

readiness or the data driven applications

27:16

or if you look at storage everywhere. And

27:18

so if you think about block storage, introducing

27:20

HyperDisc. The next generation persistent disc

27:23

give customers knobs a tune, the performance

27:25

and capacity. We've announced capabilities

27:27

around files are enterprise to right size that storage

27:30

utilization within stateful workloads for

27:32

GKE and multi writer deployment scenarios.

27:34

We've got the data protection side of things.

27:36

backup for not only GKE, but also

27:39

Google Cloud backup and DR for GCVE

27:41

and GCE and other databases. then

27:43

we also have cloud storage. And the auto class you're just

27:46

talking about of making it easy to tier data

27:48

back and forth between the different storage classes

27:50

without the additional charges. So optimizing that

27:52

placement and giving customers the information

27:55

that they need to make informed decisions about

27:57

what objects are where it was storage insights. And so

27:59

We certainly am busy again across the portfolio

28:02

of block file, object, and data protection

28:04

this year. Howard Bauchner:

28:05

Yes, you certainly have. And to anyone

28:07

who's questioning like storage. We're talking about storage.

28:10

Yes. There's so much that has to do with

28:12

storage. It's so fundamental still. And so

28:14

thank you so much. Is there anything that you wanna mention

28:16

before we start to wrap up? I think

28:18

you mentioned at the top of the show, if you didn't

28:20

have a chance to see stores spotlight, it's available

28:23

on demand. Yes. For

28:24

anyone who is listening out there, We

28:26

have the links in the show notes, storage spotlight,

28:28

second year in a We're gonna keep with this trend because

28:31

clearly there's a ton happening. And, Sean,

28:33

and Sean, I just wanna thank you

28:34

again for coming back on. Now thank you for

28:36

the time. Yeah.

28:37

Thanks Stephanie. Alright.

28:39

I wasn't wrong. Right. tons of stuff happening

28:41

around storage when it comes to optimization. cost

28:43

optimization capacity optimization, performance

28:46

optimization. We talked a lot about

28:48

rightsizing, auto classing,

28:50

file store enterprise hyper disc. We

28:53

have lots going on around the theme of simplicity

28:55

and ease of use with data protection. We have

28:57

GKE backup and Google

28:59

Cloud backup and disaster recovery. and

29:02

I love the use case that they went

29:04

over when talking about redivis. So

29:06

I'm really glad that we got Sean back on and included

29:09

Nishant this time around. It's gonna be an annual

29:11

transition that we just have storage, spotlight, and

29:13

have them jump on because I know a lot of you

29:15

might not have the time to check out

29:17

the full on demand video of that happening.

29:19

And so the podcast is such an easy way

29:21

to get the product team on and give you a great

29:24

summary of some of the exciting things that

29:26

are happening in the storage space. Now,

29:29

I know we always talked about what we're working on, and

29:31

so I just wanna give a quick update that I

29:33

am doing some exciting video content with

29:35

one of our latest partners, and

29:38

I'm not gonna give too much away, but you're

29:40

gonna see it at next a

29:42

cool partner announcement, and so I'm gonna

29:44

hopefully be able to showcase that video

29:46

soon. And then in terms of next, I'm

29:48

also doing two sessions. One

29:50

is for networking, which if you've

29:52

seen my videos, you know that I love talking about

29:54

networking. And this session covers how

29:56

you can simplify and secure your network

29:59

for all workloads

29:59

in the cloud. So we're gonna covering

30:02

all of the announcements related to

30:04

networking. And then I am

30:06

also in a session for

30:09

our partner ecosystem, where I bring on

30:11

Rubik and Exavim to talk about how you

30:13

can take on security in the

30:15

cloud using some of their tools

30:17

alongside the analytics capabilities

30:19

in Google Cloud. So check

30:21

that out. I know it might not be everyone's

30:24

cup of tea for the sessions I'm in, but we got a

30:26

ton coming from our VPs, GMs.

30:28

Obviously, Thomas Kurian, Priyanka's, in

30:30

some too, so definitely come here from these

30:33

leaders. And I'm gonna keep

30:35

reminding you about next for the next several weeks. Sorry.

30:37

I'm not sorry. But for

30:39

now, This is Stephanie Wong, and I will

30:41

see you all next week.