Google Aims For Enteprise-Grade Connectivity Via Cloud Interconnect

A cloud is only as good as the network that connects to it.

Greg DeMichillie, Google's director of product management, told attendees of Google Cloud Platform Live this week in a keynote, "you can't have a great cloud solution without great networking."

That's why Google is introducing "a range of options that let a customer of any size, from small startups to Fortune 500, easily connect their infrastructure to ours," DeMichillie said.

[ Related: Google Brings Containers To Next-Gen Cloud Offerings]

Google Cloud Interconnect is a suite of connectivity options that will enable solution providers to offer enterprise customers more secure and lower-latency network connections to the Google Cloud Platform that fit their specific needs and capabilities.

Cloud Interconnect offers three ways to connect to the Google Cloud Platform.

The first is VPN connectivity over the public Internet, an option that will be released for alpha testing in a couple weeks and become generally available in the first quarter of next year.

For enterprises that want more secure, dedicated connections, Google is offering a Carrier Interconnect plan in which hosted resources in partner data centers can directly link to the Google cloud.

Finally, there's a direct peering option that avoids all intermediaries, allowing enterprises to connect their infrastructure directly to more than 70 points of presence in Google's global network.

One of the seven launch partners for the dedicated carrier option is Equinix, the premium hosting provider with 102 data centers around the globe that debuted a cloud exchange earlier this year.

Since then, Equinix Cloud Exchange has introduced more than 50 cloud provider partners, including Google rivals Microsoft Azure in 16 markets and Amazon Web Services in eight markets.

Now Equinix customers can, for the first time, directly connect to the Google Cloud Platform in 15 of the largest enterprise markets in the U.S., Europe and Asia, Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi told CRN.

"You're not competing with traffic that comes over the public network, you go directly through cloud edge," Tarazi said. He added that the interconnectivity option offers redundancy, dedicated capacity, high bandwidth support and the ability to provision resources quickly.

"We are normalizing all the IP addresses, and you can use private or public IPs. We're normalizing the whole experience so it's very simple," Tarazi told CRN.

Rajesh Abhyankar, CEO of New Jersey-based Google premier partner MediaAgility, said the benefit of the Google cloud is that it empowers partners with Google's cutting edge technology.

"Google Cloud Platform strategy has been to bring Google's innovations to enterprises," Abhyankar told CRN.

With Cloud Interconnect, Google adds the enterprise-grade connectivity options to advance that goal, he said.

"GCI is in line with this strategy to bring over a decade of innovations in networking to the enterprise. This also brings increased flexibility, for example, to connect your private network to your private compute engine network," Abhyankar told CRN.

PUBLISHED NOV. 7, 2014