SEAN DERRINGTON: Hi.
Welcome, everyone.
Thanks for joining Patrick and me today.
We want to talk a little about Filestore, its role with SAP,
and learn a little bit more about Sabre's modernization
journey.
With that, my name is Sean Derrington, Product Management
here at Google Cloud.
And joining me today is Patrick Uckermark.
Patrick?
PATRICK UCKERMARK: Thanks, Sean.
My name is Patrick Uckermark.
I'm Senior Director at Enterprise Architecture
at Sabre.
And back to you, Sean.
SEAN DERRINGTON: Thanks, Patrick.
So we want to talk about a few things today.
One, where's my stuff?
So as you look at the application portfolio
in the journey to the cloud, what are the storage
architectures that you can choose from,
and where to think about using each of them appropriately.
We'll also talk about the Filestore product family, how
it fits into SAP and GKE workloads,
and then most importantly, we'll hear from Patrick
a little bit later about sharing about Sabre
and their experiences.
So with that, let's take a look at where's my stuff.
So as you take a look at the application portfolio,
and you think about running things on premises,
in a hybrid environment to the cloud,
or even just running all in the cloud,
there are a lot of different storage options that you have.
Within Google Cloud, our mission is really to leverage
our global infrastructure to provide an easy-to-use
and a highly available storage for all of your workloads.
Within Google, we support nine different applications
that support over a billion users each.
It's that same underlying storage technology
between cloud storage and persistent disk
that we also make available to you
as an enterprise to run your business on,
whether it be persistent disk at different price
points for capacity and performance
to Google Cloud Storage, where you're
looking at different price points for access frequency
and retention requirements.
I'll talk about Filestore in a minute.
But on the right-hand side, from the data protection side,
Actifio will actually protect your applications
and databases.
And you can also protect the native storage
through snapshots and backups as an example.
But as broad as this portfolio is,
we do have an open ecosystem approach.
And if you're a company looking to run in a hybrid mode,
and you're a NetApp or a Dell customer,
and you have their storage on premises,
you can absolutely go through the marketplace,
procure that storage, deploy it in a hybrid model, on-prem,
and in the cloud, and enjoy a lot of those same benefits.
You can obviously deploy it 100% in the cloud if you wanted to.
If you're in the high-performance computing
space, and you need a parallel file system
based upon those types of workloads,
you can absolutely do that with DDN.
It's available also in the marketplace
through their parallel file system offering.
And these are just a few examples of storage partners
that we have in our ecosystem that
are available through the marketplace.
So let's take a look at Filestore and the product
family that we have.
Take a look.
Filestore is a managed NFS file service.
It's a broad range of use cases.
On the left-hand side of the chart here,
you see Filestore Basic, really suited for file serving,
web serving, test dev environments.
You can scale up to 64 terabytes in a file system.
You can even back up those files if you want to
within the region.
The middle-high scale is actually oriented and designed
for high-performance computing workloads,
whether that be pharma and genomic sequencing
or financial services like quantitative analysis trading.
You can have higher capacity requirements
up to 100 terabytes, and even higher performance requirements
of 25 gigabytes per second of throughput.
But based upon the HPC requirements,
those storage capacities can ebb and flow over time.
And so you can actually grow and shrink your storage capacity
as needed.
We've also recently introduced Filestore Enterprise,
which is designed for SAP and GKE workloads.
This is something that you can also grow and shrink over time.
But not only does it support GKE and SAP,
it also supports those lift-and-shift applications
that you're going to move from on-prem into the cloud.
But we've also focused on the protection side of things.
So snapshots to be able to recover your data,
but also making sure that data is
highly available with a four nine SLA associated with that.
And this is actually one of the things
that differentiates Filestore Enterprise,
is to give you that trust and that confidence
to run in a native and really important applications
in the cloud.
But it's also an opportunity to take
a look at simplifying your operations with other cloud
services.
So within Google Cloud, you leverage
the same identity and access management, the same billing.
When you're monitoring and managing
your network in compute and storage,
you can do so consistently through our cloud operations
suite.
We also give you the simplified operations
to do things consistently over and over.
Because ultimately, that's going to drive down your costs
and deliver more benefit.
Within Filestore, the diverse application requirements
you may have may mean that Basic is
a better application, a better file storage solution,
than high-scale or Enterprise.
But whatever the case may be, you can manage all of those
consistently with the same APIs, the same gcloud
CLI you can use.
So again, from an operational standpoint,
regardless of which applications are
consuming what Filestore type, the operations are consistent.
And that protection for regional availability
is actually something unique to Filestore Enterprise.
And really important, because we all
know if you think about deploying
an on-prem environment, three dual controllers that scale up,
and you try to set up a campus-based three-way
synchronous replication, we all know how difficult
that is to make sure all those lines
and volumes are associated and mirrored correctly.
But with Filestore Enterprise, you have a few radio buttons.
You click the capacity, you select the region.
And underneath the covers, because it's a managed service,
we actually replicate that synchronously
to three different zones within the region,
which means that you now have an RPO of zero.
But it also means that you have an RTO of zero.
The same MyFilesystem access point
that you're using for an application running in Zone A,
we just get the files from Zone B and C
if there's any interruptions.
So not only is it protecting your information
by synchronously replicating it, it's
making it seamless so that your applications and users don't
know that anything has changed if a zone is interrupted.
Now, in the case of a file deletion,
where you're doing test dev, and you
want to roll that file system back to a prior recovery point,
you can do that with our snapshots.
And regardless to the capacity of the file system,
up to 10 terabytes, you can recover an individual file
or the entire file system in less than 10 minutes.
So if you want to give your users the ability
to recover an individual file, you can absolutely do that.
But you can also have the cloud ops team roll back your file
system in less than 10 minutes.
And from a snapshot perspective and regional availability
perspective, these are some of the things
that really is interesting and what SADA is looking for.
SADA is one of our key partners.
They actually are, three years running,
our partner of the year.
And Miles Ward, the CTO there, is really
looking to help companies migrate from their data centers
into Google Cloud.
And that's not done all overnight.
They move certain applications over time.
And as they modernize those applications
and they look at GKE, they need something
that's going to be able to support that
from a fully managed, very easy-to-manage
cloud-native file service.
But also the availability side of things
for those critical applications, you
can't decrease what you're actually
delivering to the business once you move things to the cloud.
And that's really one of the things
that regional availability is interesting--
for SADA.
So with that, we talked about different workloads.
And I mentioned that-- earlier that Filestore Enterprise
is really designed for SAP and GKE specifically.
And within SAP, it's a three-tier architecture.
You have your database tier, and you have your compute,
and you want to have a fast performing storage there.
And that's what we provide with persistent disk.
But you're also concerned about zone separation
for your database servers.
And so you want to have your compute database
as close to the persistent disk as possible.
And that's fine and good, and certainly important,
but it's also important to think about that middle tier,
the application servers.
And so when you're thinking about designing NetWeaver,
having zone separation for your file servers for your-- excuse
me, for your application servers,
is just as important, because all of those applications
servers have consistent access to Filestore.
And so whether that application server in Zone A
is accessing the data or Zone B, it
doesn't matter, because again, coming back
to that mount point, it's the same regardless
of which zone within a region your NetWeaver's deployed in.
So you have the high availability
for the shared executables down in the lower right
corner of the slide there.
The other examples here between transport and interface
directories, those are also important.
But the shared executables is one of the key considerations
for designing SAP in Filestore.
A lot of the organizations are looking at GKE.
And it's certainly popular for stateless applications.
Ephemeral storage, the application dies,
the storage dies, it doesn't matter.
You just rebuild your pod, and you're off and running.
But more and more, we look at how
to design that, we've got to consider persistent disk.
It could be local SSD and also persistent disk.
Again, different choice of price and performance there.
But more and more organizations are actually
running stateful applications.
And those stateful applications now
require storage that can be accessible
if you have a failover from one pod to the other,
or you need to protect that data to recover
in the event of a failure.
It's no longer ephemeral, it's stateful.
And so this is one of the things that we've
done with not only the snapshots but the regional availability
that impact how you can run GKE workloads through our CSI
driver.
And this is actually an option for both Filestore Basic
and Enterprise.
Again, coming back to choices between price, performance,
and features, you as an enterprise
get to choose what's going to be best suited for you.
And if that choice is object storage with cloud storage,
that's fine, too.
You have standard and archive tiers
to choose from based on access frequency and retention
periods.
So with that, let me turn over to Patrick
to share a little bit more about Sabre and the journey
that you're undergoing.
Patrick?
PATRICK UCKERMARK: Thank you, Sean.
We at Sabre, we do have a long-term strategic partnership
with Google to support our cloud migrations
and technical transformation of our application portfolio.
As part of this, we decided to define a cloud-native strategy,
which means we're trying to adopt as many
of the cloud-native services that Google provides
to us to eliminate the manual overhead as part
of our applications, and to become
more active and flexible in our application deployments
as well.
One of the areas where the Filestore service is
very obvious to be used on our side
is SAP, which has a strong demand on performance,
flexibility, and also requires, in order
to provide a high availability setup, the shared
executable features, which were lacking
in some other environments in the cloud.
And this hinders our increased availability,
which we now can address with the service in GCP.
Another area where we're also strongly considering
the service, and we're seeing a lot of benefits in doing so,
is GKE.
We traditionally started with stateless applications
as much as possible.
But over time, we saw teams spinning up
a lot of stateful parts of that outside of the cluster
to make sure we have the reliability.
But PVs with the Filestore Enterprise service
will allow us to support that inside the container
environment, being most efficient with the teams,
and getting most of the environment.
And for our travel solutions and hospitality solutions
applications, we are migrating out
of the existing on-premise data centers with their workloads
towards the cloud.
And one of the bigger challenges is
meeting those technical requirements
that happen in on-premise environment
today in their current form or fashion,
and meet this somehow in the cloud.
We are trying to avoid moving as is
but also adding complexity in doing so.
But a native service like Filestore
will allow us to get rid of some of the manual overhead
that we have in those teams and spend more time
focusing on the actual tech transformation
than really being busy with the migration
and finding legacy technology replacements.
And with that, the Enterprise Filestore service
will allow us to perform the migration
in a less complex manner, but as part of this,
do a tech transformation and move
more quickly into the cloud, allowing resources
to be freed up and focused on the future of migration,
on the tech transformation, and other applications as well.
And with that, thanks, everyone.
And back to Sean.
SEAN DERRINGTON: Great.
Thank you, Patrick.
So we talked about a number of things--
the Google Cloud portfolio and the breadth
of storage offerings we have to meet diverse application
requirements, from block to file to object,
as well as our open ecosystem of other partners; talked
about SAP and GKE workloads, and how
we've engineered Filestore Enterprise to directly satisfy
that with the high regional availability as well
as a snapshot capability; and then, perhaps most importantly,
heard from Patrick about Sabre's journey to the cloud,
and how they're planning to use Filestore
across a diverse portfolio of application requirements.
With that, I'd like to thank everybody for attending today.
I really appreciate the time and attention.
And enjoy the rest of the show.