IT leaders today are being asked to simultaneously support their company’s infrastructure, find opportunities for growth, and meet their goals with fewer resources and smaller budgets than before. Recently we highlighted three customers who are leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine to achieve these goals while lowering their TCO and transforming their organization. 

It’s because of these successful customer outcomes that we have been awarded the 2023 VMware Cloud Innovation and SaaS Transformation partner achievement award for delivering solutions that accelerate customers’ digital transformation journey. We’re honored to receive this award and continue to stay focused on delivering tremendous value to our customers.

In the past few months, we’ve also made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Today’s post provides a recap of the latest milestones that make it easier for you to migrate and run your vSphere workloads in a cloud-first, enterprise-class VMware environment in Google Cloud. 

Back in September 2022, we announced a number of updates including the preview of API/CLI support (which is now available). In February 2023, we also talked about how to use NetApp CVS as datastores for VMware Engine.

Key updates this time around include:

Availability of VMware Engine in Delhi, Santiago and Milan regions: This brings the availability of VMware Engine to 17 regions worldwide, each supporting 4 9’s of uptime SLA for clusters 5 or more, serving the needs of our regional and multi-national customers. In addition, we have also added a second zone in the London region.

Filestore datastore support for VMware Engine: Generally Available in all VMware Engine regions, you can use Filestore High Scale and Enterprise tier instances as external NFS datastores for VMware Engine nodes. Filestore is VMware certified as an NFS datastore with VMware Engine. You can size compute and storage capacity independently to meet your workload requirements for your storage-intensive VMs. You can also leverage vSAN for low-latency VM requirements and scale Filestore from TBs to PBs for the capacity hungry VMs. If interested in this feature, please contact your Google account team.

Stretched private clouds: These private clouds stretch across two data zones and a witness zone all within the same Google Cloud region. Stretched private clouds use vSphere and vSAN stretched clusters to provide compute and storage high availability against zone-level failures. This capability is now available in Frankfurt and Sydney regions. Learn more here.

Zerto solution version 9.5u1 support: This recovery solution allows critical infrastructure and application virtual machines (VMs) to be replicated continuously from your on-premises vCenter to your private cloud. Learn more about setting up Zerto here.

Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (GCBDR): GCBDR is available to protect applications running in VMware Engine, and can be managed within the Google Cloud Console. We recently launched GCBDR under Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service simplifying customers’ purchasing and support experience. 

vTPM support: Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds now support the addition of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 virtual cryptoprocessor to a virtual machine. You can add vTPMs to VMs by following VMware instructions or upgrading your existing VMs to include a vTPM. You can read more about this in the VMware blog.

This brings us to the end of our updates this time. For the latest updates to the service, please bookmark our release notes.

Over the past several years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in our infrastructure product portfolio. We launched new Tau T2D VMs, which deliver 42% better price-performance vs. other leading cloud providers. We upgraded Cloud Storage to offer more flexibility to support customers’ enterprise and analytics workloads, with dual-region buckets and upcoming Turbo Replication. And we’ve delivered numerous improvements to our global network, including expansion to 29 cloud regions.

However, from conversations with customers, we’ve also learned we can do more to align our capabilities and pricing with their varied workloads. So, today, we are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads. They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers.

Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products. Ultimately, our goal is to provide more flexible pricing models and options for how customers are using our cloud services. Here’s an overview of what customers can expect:

Which services are changing? What new services are being introduced?

We are changing prices for some storage, compute, and networking products. The changes provide customers with new ways to optimize their spending based on workload type and size, or data portability needs, as well as reducing costs on some services. Specific changes include:

• Cloud Storage pricing changes for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access
• Introduction of a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD), so that compliance/archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads
• New outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing, in line with other leading cloud providers
• New pricing for Network Topology, which will include Performance Dashboard within Network Intelligence Center at no additional charge

Will customers’ bills increase? Decrease?

The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in their bills, we’re also introducing new options for some services to better align with usage, which could lower some customers’ bills. In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We’re working directly with customers to help them understand which changes may impact them.

When will the new prices go into effect?

Today, we sent customers a six-month notice on the price changes, which go into effect on October 1, 2022. Customers under existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount will not face any changes until renewal. Our goal is to help our customers manage any impact of these changes and allow time for them to adjust or modify their implementations.

What should customers do next?

There are a number of things customers can do to prepare for the changes:

• Read through the Mandatory Service Announcement (MSA) sent on March 14.
• Consider what actions, if any, they may want to take based on current storage, networking, and compute needs. Many of these changes may have simple choices associated with them.
• Consider using the Storage Transfer Service to select the right Cloud Storage bucket locations. Storage Transfer Service will be available free-of-cost for transfers within Cloud Storage, starting April 2 until the end of the year.

For those customers under contract, Google Cloud account representatives are available to discuss these changes. Please visit our pricing page and the links below for more details on our updates to storage, networking, and PD pricing, including information on how to modify your implementations if needed. If you do not have an account manager and still have questions please review our public FAQ, which will be updated regularly, as well as the resource links below.

Note: This pricing analysis is valid as of February 2022.

Resources:

• Cloud Storage Pricing Announcements 
• Load Balancing pricing Announcements
• Network Intelligence Center pricing Announcements
• PD Pricing Announcements
• Public FAQ

While the shift to digital business and the cloud has been well under way for some years now, organizations today have a new sense of urgency due to COVID-19. Delivering digital transformation is no longer a ‘nice to have’ option, rather, it is an operational imperative. Taking advantage of the infrastructure, platform and solution gains that cloud and microservices architecture provide is a must for brands today. 

At Google Cloud, we understand the pressures and challenges organizations of all sizes, across all industries are facing. The pandemic has dramatically impacted global commerce at-large, exposing (for many organizations across multiple sectors) gaps in omnichannel capabilities, business continuity and forecasting plans, not to mention spots in supply chain agility, resilience and responsiveness. 

A rapidly evolving consumer-driven commerce landscape has put innovation squarely in the spotlight for supply chain teams all over the world, with the effects of the global pandemic making it increasingly difficult for manufacturers, wholesalers, third party logistics providers and retailers (in particular) to weather the perfect storm of fast-moving consumer trends and a need for ‘always on’ digital innovation. 

These same effects have driven increasing interest and uptake of technology like the Manhattan Active® suite of solutions, as well as our own cloud platform; both of which afford organizations the levels of agility, flexibility and scalability needed to insulate their people, processes and long-term business strategies against unforeseen future obstacles such as global pandemics or international trade disputes.

An excellent example of this agility, flexibility and scalability in action is PVH’s response to the global pandemic. One of the most admired fashion and lifestyle companies with such iconic brands as Calvin Klein, TOMMY HILFIGER, Van Heusen, and IZOD, PVH was forced to temporarily close its physical stores and, as a result, experienced a sudden massive increase in online sales. The retailer was able to quickly pivot by adjusting its business rules in Manhattan Distributed Order Management (part of Manhattan Active Omni) to expose store inventory to online consumers and reroute its fulfillment processes. Thanks to Manhattan’s solution delivered through Google Cloud, in a matter of days, PVH was able to leverage both its distribution centers and vast store network to fulfill its online orders.

“The events of 2020 have accelerated retail and ecommerce operations forward,” said David Herridge, executive vice president of Global Value Chain Technologies for PVH. “With quick, creative thinking and the right partner, we were able to pivot operations, satisfy our customers and prepare for the future.”

Manhattan’s products have been recognized for their ability to solve real-world challenges through innovation, and used by many of the world’s top brands to solve some of their most complex commerce and supply chain challenges: the latest recognition is Manhattan’s position as sole leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave™ for Order Management Solutions. 

Since December 2018, Google Cloud has been collaborating closely with the team at Manhattan and its ‘always on’, versionless approach to innovation. And, during the last two and a half years, Manhattan has significantly accelerated its cloud-first solutions and market adoption, resulting in tremendous growth in its overall cloud business efforts. 

By building cloud native solutions on Google Cloud, the teams at Manhattan continue to deliver the high-performance, elastic, high-redundancy, secure solutions their customers rely on. Moreover, it means both Google Cloud and Manhattan continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of the supply chain and omnichannel innovations that underpin global commerce – innovation that is needed more now than maybe ever before.

Our commitment to distributed cloud solutions and ongoing innovation, not to mention the fact Google Cloud operates a net carbon-neutral cloud, means that the working partnership between both industry leading teams continues to be a perfect match of brand values; not just from a technology perspective, but also a long-term sustainability and environmental one too.

More information on the partnership can be found here.

They say black never goes out of style. It’s something the team at Nuuly, URBN’s digital rental and resale business, know well. And it’s not just true of the company’s garments but their gadgets, too.

“I was having an offhand conversation with a UX designer recently,” Rebecca Sandercock, Nuuly’s strategy and insights manager, recalled in a recent interview from the company’s sunny, South Philly headquarters. “The designer was talking about how we had chosen dark mode for a number of interfaces internally because it actually saves so much on electrical output. They had the data to back that decision up, but more importantly, it’s just the kind of thing everyone is thinking about all the time here.”

Of course most every business is thinking about sustainability in some way these days. What makes Nuuly stand out is how quickly it can act, thanks in large part to the technology platform that’s made the entire enterprise possible.

“We’re kind of sustainable by our very nature,” Kim Gallagher, Nuuly’s director of marketing and customer success, said.

While she meant the rental and resale business, which helps customers buy fewer clothes and sees Nuuly items worn many times by many people—Gallagher could just as well have been referring to the sustainability inherent in, and enabled by, cloud computing.

There are the obvious, and oft-cited, advantages, such as how centralized data centers can operate more efficiently (some have been carbon neutral since the beginning). Yet there are even more subtle yet substantial benefits. In a marketplace and climate that are both changing faster and faster, sustainability requires a certain amount of agility. Such adaptability and scalability are intrinsic to the cloud technology that threads its way throughout Nuuly.

It turns out that being cloud native also means being sustainability native—as well as growth native. Since its 2019 launch, Nuuly’s net sales have risen roughly 6x over the first three fiscal years.

Cloud fits any situation

When URBN was developing Nuuly—launching in just 10 months—it chose to create everything from scratch on Google Cloud. Despite being part of a larger organization with decades of history and expertise, the company recognized the limitations presented by legacy systems and, more importantly, the necessity of building a wholly new platform that could be fully responsive.

The company has to react not only to new fashion trends but, crucially, the changing behaviors of customers. And not just their evolving tastes but also shopping habits, delivery preferences, unexpected customer service requests—is this a pattern, or a stain?—and social media chatter.

The pressure for a successful launch was high. The URBN portfolio, which also includes Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People, had to keep evolving to satisfy a new generation of shopper who exists in an increasingly crowded and demanding digital marketplace.

The cloud’s responsiveness has thus proven its worth in creating a financially sustainable business as well as an environmentally sustainable one. Those even go hand in hand, as Gallagher points out: “Every customer who keeps renting is one who isn’t buying more occasion-specific clothes that go unworn most of the time.”

Dr. Alan Rosenwinkel, director of data science at URBN, had heard from his team about one garment that has become an emblem for the power of the platform. “It had been rented 25 different times before someone loved it enough to buy it and keep it forever,” he explained. (It’s also an emblem of the power of the cloud, that they would have the data awareness to track a single item so closely.)

It’s a new way of shopping made possible by a new way of computing. As one writer for Business Insider cheered, Nuuly “completely cured my addiction to fast-fashion.”

It makes for a healthy business, too. Sales for fiscal year 2019 exceeded $8 million and surpassed $24 million in 2020—one of the few URBN segments to grow during a tough year for fashion—and reached $47 million in 2021. The subscriber base had grown to 51,000 at the end of January.

Agility drives sustainability drives agility

For digital retailers to achieve such customer enthusiasm often relies as much on how the clothes get there as how they look. And those deliveries turn out to be a prime example of where Nuuly’s sustainability and technology meet.

For now, all shipping is handled through a state-of-the-art distribution center in Bucks County on the Philadelphia outskirts. Garments are shipped six-at-a-time, in fully reusable packaging, using ground transportation to keep the carbon footprint to a minimum. In certain limited geographic areas, shipments were sometimes taking longer than the two to five days most members would find acceptable.

“If we were an older company or weren’t set up from a technology perspective to be agile, we might have just said, ‘All right, we’re going to just go to three-day shipping for everyone,’” Rosenwinkel said. “That would drive up the cost, and the environmental impact. But we were able to be more strategic and more targeted about it.”

By regularly analyzing customer sentiment and retention data through BigQuery and Cloud Composer, and tying those to historical shipping times, Nuuly has been able to understand how shipping speed impacts its customers. Using a custom-built order management system, deliveries can be automatically adjusted to arrive more quickly, particularly when certain regions or days of the week are proving difficult to reach customers in time. These accelerated deliveries, like all Nuuly shipments, are made via UPS’s Carbon Offset program.

“Because we have the data, and the platforms to analyze it all,” Rosenwinkel said, “we’re delivering faster with the bare minimum impact on cost and emissions.”

It’s just one example of how modern retailers must juggle so many demands from consumers, workers, suppliers, and even regulators. Adding sustainability to that mix could be seen as a burden, but Nuuly shows how the right technology can lead to a holistic approach that makes all those interests work together even better.

And it allows for more opportunities and more kinds of sustainability, reaching from the designer’s atelier to the customer’s doorstep.

Sustainable details at every level

Back at the distribution center, workers can experience sustainability in a different way, as data is leveraged to enhance their well-being.

All workers are equipped with customized Android devices that help guide order tracking and fulfillment, plus cleaning, repairs, and reselling of garments as needs change throughout their lifecycle. Yet the insights go even deeper. The data science team has closely analyzed routes and repetitive motions for workers to keep their strenuous jobs as low-impact as the company’s broader environmental footprint.

“Through machine learning, we estimate we’ll be able to save our workers over 300,000 miles of steps over a five year period,” Rosenwinkel said. That’s enough walking to circumnavigate the globe 12.5 times.

The company has also applied ingenuity to one of the most notorious aspects of digital retail: packaging. Made from 100% post-consumer recycled materials like plastic bottles, Nuuly’s reusable carriers require no disposable bags or hangers to send goods back and forth. And once the packages have reached their end of life, the team is working with designers on ways to repurpose them into items that can then be offered for rental or sale on Nuuly.

“We’re really looking at the circular economy from every angle,” Gallagher said. “It’s built into the business.”

That includes not just the research the team did on-site at the Dry Cleaning & Laundry Institute—”We went to laundry school,” Gallagher jokes—but the digital tools that take those lessons even further. The team is always looking for ways to optimize fabric care, both to cut down on chemicals and water usage and extend the life of a garment. By analyzing the lifespan of every item, Nuuly not only makes them last longer but can identify problems faster. Employees even use custom apps to mark stains and damage so repair teams can more easily identify and fix the issues.

With its meticulous inventory tracking, Nuuly can even take marginal items, like a white gown or jeans with a small stain, and turn them into a custom dye job or an upcycling opportunity with a partner. These reworked items are then inserted back into the Nuuly Rent inventory as part of a growing collection of one-of-a-kind pieces, called Re_Nuuly.

Other services have launched quickly and easily thanks to the company’s cloud-enabled backend. Wanting to encourage more community and more reuse, the company created Nuuly Thrift. Debuting last fall after just a year in development, the team built everything from new interfaces to an evolved point of sale system.

It’s enabled Nuuly to offer many garments for rent or sale simultaneously, with “truly real-time inventories,” Rosenwinkel said. “So when it’s gone on one site, it shows up as gone on every site—no more surprises.”

Except for the good kind.

“I like to think we’re helping our customers think about ownership in a completely new way,” Sandercock said. “Once they run out of a use for a garment, they can offer it back, and sell it, and someone else will get to enjoy it and give it a new life. And Nuuly, we get to keep it in the community and keep it in the ecosystem, which is really cool—we’re taking extended responsibility over what happens to the clothing we create.”

Many of the world’s leading companies run on SAP—and deploying it on Google Cloud extends the benefits of SAP even further. Migrating your current SAP S/4HANA deployment to Google Cloud—whether it resides on your company’s on-premises servers or another cloud service—provides your organization with a flexible virtualized architecture that lets you scale your environment to match your workloads, so you pay only for the compute and storage capacity you need at any given moment. Google Cloud includes built-in features, such as Compute Engine live migration and automatic restart, that minimize downtime for infrastructure maintenance. And it allows you to integrate your SAP data with multiple data sources and process it using Google Cloud technology such as BigQuery to drive data analytics.

SAP server-side architecture consists of two layers: the SAP HANA database, and the Netweaver application layer. In this blog post, we’ll look at the options and steps for moving the database layer to Google Cloud as a lift and shift or rehost, a straightforward approach that entails moving your current SAP environment unchanged onto Google Cloud.

Deploying an SAP HANA system on Google Cloud

Google Cloud offers SAP-certified virtual machines (VMs) optimized for SAP products, including SAP HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, as well as dedicated servers for SAP HANA for environments greater than 12TB. (For a complete list of VM and hardware options, visit the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.)

Before proceeding with a rehost migration to Google Cloud, your current (source) environment and Google Cloud (target) environments should meet these specifications:

Prerequisites:  

• The configuration of the Google Cloud environment (i.e., VM  resources, SSD storage capacity) should be identical to that of the source environment. If the underlying hardware is different, however, you must use Option 2 for your migration, detailed below.
• Both environments should be running the same operating system (SUSE or RHEL Linux).
• The HANA version, instance number, and system ID (SID) should be identical.

• Schema names must remain the same.
• Establishing the network connection between the on-premises environment and Google Cloud will be required in this phase to support rehost of the SAP application.you can use Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect. Learn more about Dedicated Interconnect and Cloud VPN.

Note: Depending on your internet connection and bandwidth requirements, we recommend using a Dedicated Interconnect over Cloud VPN for production environments. 

We offer a number of automated processes to accelerate your cloud journey. To deploy the SAP HANA system on Google Cloud, you can use the Google Cloud Deployment manager or Terraform and Ansible scripts available on GitHub with configuration file templates to define your installation. For more details, see the Google Cloud SAP HANA Planning Guide.

Note: To deploy SAP HANA on Google Cloud machine types that are certified by SAP for production, please review the Certification for SAP HANA on Google Cloud page. 

Moving an SAP HANA Database to Google Cloud

There are two different options you can use to rehost your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud, and each has pros and cons that you should consider when deciding on your approach.

Option 1: Asynchronous replication uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide continuous data replication from the source system (also known as the primary system) to the destination or secondary system—in this case residing on Google Cloud. It’s best for mission-critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process requires less manual intervention. Here’s where you can learn more on HANA Asynchronous Replication.

Option 2: Backup and restore relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of the database that is then transferred to Google Cloud, where it is restored in the new environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases may require more downtime via this method vs. asynchronous replication. It also involves more manual tasks. However, it requires fewer resources to perform, making it an attractive option for less urgent use cases. Here’s where you can learn more on SAP HANA database Backup and restore.

How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Asynchronous Replication

1. Create and configure Dedicated Interconnect or Cloud VPN between the current environment and Google Cloud.
2. Set up SAP HANA asynchronous replication. You can configure system replication using SAP HANA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio, or hdbnsutil. See Setting Up SAP HANA System Replication in the SAP HANA Administration Guide.
3. Be sure to use the same instance number and HANA SID in the template as the primary instance.
4. Configure the Google Cloud instance as the secondary node for using HANA Asynchronous replication.
5. Perform data validation once full data replication is completed to the SAP HANA database in Google Cloud. To learn more: HANA System Replication overview.  
6. Perform an SAP HANA takeover on your standby database. This switches your active system from the current primary system onto the secondary system on Google Cloud. Once the takeover command runs, the system on Google Cloud becomes the new primary system.To learn more: HANA Takeover. 

How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Backup and Restore

1. Create a full backup of your SAP HANA database in your current environment.
2. Create a new storage bucket in your Google Cloud environment. Visit Creating Storage Buckets in the Google Cloud Storage documentation. 
3. Download and install gsutil onto the source environment and run it to upload the HANA backup to the Google Cloud storage bucket. To install gsutil utility on any computer or server, visit Install gsutil in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.
   Note: You can run parallel multi thread/multi processing in gsutil to copy large files more quickly.
4. Recover the HANA database on Google Cloud using SAP’s RECOVER DATABASE statement. See RECOVER DATABASE Statement (Backup and Recovery) in the SAP HANA SQL Reference Guide for SAP HANA Platform.

Note: BackInt agent is an integrated SAP interface tool used for HANA database on Google Cloud.Backint agent for SAP HANA can be used to store and retrieve backups directly from Google Cloud Storage. It is supported and certified by SAP on Google Cloud. To learn more:  SAP HANA Backint Agent on Google Cloud. 

In summary, we recommend using Asynchronous Replication (Option 1) for mission-critical applications that require the lowest downtime window. For all other applications, we recommend Backup and Restore (Option 2), as this approach requires fewer resources. It’s also a great way to implement the backup and restore functionality on Google Cloud.

A rehost migration is the most straightforward path to getting your SAP on HANA system up and running on Google Cloud. And the sooner you migrate, the sooner you can take advantage of the many benefits Google Cloud brings to your SAP solution. For more information on the different migration options please review: SAP on Google Cloud: Migration strategies. 

Learn more about deploying SAP on Google Cloud. Technical resources can be found here.