As organizations continue to evolve to meet the needs of their stakeholders, they are increasingly looking to adopt the cloud and digitally transform their business. Since our partnership with NetApp began in 2018, we’ve been focused on delivering the infrastructure, tools, and services to help customers on their cloud migration journey and benefit from their data to better serve their customers. 

“Customers are looking to adopt flexible and scalable solutions that meet the needs of their business,” said Ronen Schwartz, SVP & GM, Cloud Volumes, NetApp. “Our long-standing partnership with Google Cloud continues to deliver innovative solutions for customers as they look to migrate and run their business critical applications in the cloud while unlocking the power of their data with industry-leading cloud services.”

Innovative, industry-first solutions have become the standard for our partnership. From the general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud in 2019, to our collaboration on new architectures in 2020 with the release of the software-defined CVS powered by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we continue to deliver first-of-its-kind enterprise file storage services together. In 2021, the pace of innovation has only increased—together, we delivered volume replication powered by SnapMirror, which efficiently copies volume data from one Google Cloud region to another for data consistency, development, testing, or disaster recovery. 

We’ve also made our services available globally—you can now run Cloud Volumes ONTAP in all 28 Google Cloud regions, and CVS is now available in 19 regions, allowing you to access our services wherever you are around the globe. All of this is backed up by a 99.99% SLA for CVS, enabling high availability for your enterprise workloads.

Hundreds of customers including MailerLite, a leader in marketing automation, have benefitted from our joint services. MailerLite was looking to move millions of files to the cloud without disruption as they were facing availability, management, and maintenance challenges as their business scaled. By leveraging NetApp CVS on Google Cloud, MailerLite was able to migrate over 100 million files to Google Cloud in about an hour, removing their ongoing infrastructure overhead, saving developer hours, and eliminating the scalability limitations they previously experienced. 

Expanding our partnership

Last week at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we announced we are expanding our strategic partnership in two ways to make it even easier for customers to migrate and run business critical applications on Google Cloud. First, NetApp will provide storage infrastructure for the newly announced Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, where data resides in customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities. This enables a safe and secure way to modernize an on-premises deployment while still meeting data security and privacy requirements.

Additionally, for customers looking to migrate their VMware workloads to Google Cloud, we announced preview access for NetApp Cloud Volumes as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. By providing customers with the choice to scale compute and storage independently, customers can now reduce costs and complexity when migrating and running storage-bound workloads. This also allows customers to address regional disaster recovery use cases, making it easier and more cost-effective to move on-premises workloads into Google Cloud. To get started, you can sign up for preview access using the Registration for Preview Access form.

Looking forward

We’re excited for what’s to come with our partnership and committed to delivering value to customers across industries. Google Cloud is a Gold sponsor at this week’s NetApp Insight, and we invite you to join our spotlight session featuring Google Cloud and NetApp leaders. Additionally, we are leading multiple breakout sessions where you will hear from our product team on how you can accelerate cloud adoption with Google Cloud and NetApp. You can also learn more and get started today by visiting our NetApp on Google Cloud website.

Enterprises want to embrace the pace of innovation and an operational business model of the modern-day cloud, but they don’t want to disrupt their existing IT landscape or upgrade all their legacy applications. This presents a conundrum, as most legacy applications were not designed to run in the cloud, and migrating them can be challenging, risky and cost-prohibitive. 

The complexity, cost and risk of cloud migration often stand in the way of a successful digital transformation. At Google Cloud, we work to meet you where you are and help you craft a migration strategy that lets you run what you want, where you want, how you want. This is why we’re excited to introduce Bare Metal Solution: to jumpstart the migration of applications that have been holding back your cloud adoption. 

Bare Metal Solution consists of all the infrastructure you need to run your specialized workload such as Oracle Database close to Google Cloud. This infrastructure is connected with a dedicated, low-latency and highly resilient interconnect, and connects to all native Google Cloud services. Bare Metal Solution uses OEM hardware that is certified to run multiple enterprise applications, most of which can be migrated to this infrastructure with little or no change, minimizing the risk of migration while simultaneously increasing its velocity.

Bare Metal Solution also comes with automation tools to help you onboard your environment quickly—provisioning your applications, relational databases, configuring popular operating systems and setting up services such as backups and monitoring. The management interface will be familiar to your existing IT teams or systems integrator, allowing you to leverage your investments in existing tools, processes and personnel.

In addition to providing state-of-the-art infrastructure and integrated low-latency access to Google Cloud, Bare Metal Solution also provides the following:

• Completely managed hardware infrastructure: End-to-end infrastructure management such as compute, storage and networking, as well as fully managed and monitored environments such as power, cooling and facilities.
• Google Cloud support and billing: A seamless support experience with support for infrastructure, including defined SLAs for initial response. 24X7 coverage for all Priority 1 and 2 issues. Unified billing across Google Cloud and Bare Metal Solution. 
• Service Level Agreements: Defined enterprise-grade SLA for hardware uptime and interconnect availability.

As an integral part of Google Cloud, Bare Metal Solution lets you off-load provisioning, managing and monitoring of your infrastructure to Google, so you can focus on your own data center modernization. 

The nitty gritty 

Many of the workloads that run on Bare Metal Solution have demanding CPU and I/O requirements. Bare Metal Solution provides a cost-effective and scalable architecture based on state-of-the-art x86 servers and high-performance, resilient storage. The servers are offered in several fixed configurations that support most mainstream enterprise operating systems:

• Dual-socket x86 systems
  • 16 core with 384 GB DRAM
  • 24 core with 768 GB DRAM
  • 56 core with 1536 GB DRAM
• Quad-socket x86 systems
  • 56 core with 1536 GB DRAM 
  • 112 core with 3072 GB DRAM

Bare Metal Solution servers can be used for standalone applications, or configured with application native or database native clustering technologies for high availability. Storage is offered in 1TB volume increments of either hybrid or all-flash disk. For applications that require custom compute shapes or special-purpose hardware, we also offer bespoke hardware configurations. 

Bare Metal Solution uses OEM hardware that is certified for many ISV software applications as well as custom built applications, including those built on Oracle Database. These hardware configurations are offered as a subscription, billed monthly with a preferred term length of 36 months. There are no data ingress and egress charges between Bare Metal Solution and Google Cloud in the same region; customers are responsible for provisioning adequate bandwidth for their business needs.

Legacy apps are no barrier to cloud

Google Cloud is the preferred destination for organizations building cloud-native applications as well as migrating existing on-premises applications, bringing reliable infrastructure, leading data analytics capabilities, and a culture of innovation to your IT environment. Whether you’re looking to build new applications in the cloud or to overhaul your infrastructure, we’re here to help you reach your digital transformation goals. And now, with Bare Metal Solution, we’re excited to extend the power of Google Cloud to specialized, legacy workloads. To learn more please visit our website.

Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) executive Mark Eimer explains how an ambitiously-timed rollout of a comprehensive suite of Google products helped the entire organization—from doctors to IT staff—achieve better security, cultivate a more equitable work environment, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

How does a recently merged, 17-hospital healthcare system fast-track a platform migration and hardware rollout securely and in a way that improves work for everyone, regardless of location or role? These are the questions that kept me up at night in early 2020, when the pandemic demanded a “big bang”—something our legacy laptops and operating systems couldn’t handle.

We began our work with Google in 2020 with the adoption of Chrome as our default browser. As we migrated platforms, keeping patient data safe was of the utmost importance to us, along with providing every staff member with the tools they needed to work virtually. Our staff often experienced issues accessing our web-based applications using Internet Explorer or Edge Browser, a problem that went away when we switched to Chrome. Chrome’s versatile compatibility also made it easier for my team to migrate all of our web-based operations, and Chrome’s security and manageability were key components to making this switch a huge win for the organization.

The success of this migration led us to extend our Google partnership to patient care applications—where Google’s expertise in AI and ML helps scale the use of diagnostics tools and improve other aspects of the patient journey.

Achieving security at every step 

Like so many other healthcare organizations, we’ve been concerned about ransomware attacks. This is part of why we moved to Google Workspace and distributed over 3,000 Chrome OS devices in kiosk mode in March of 2020, when many of us went remote due to the pandemic. We were very concerned about team members accessing corporate applications through home devices that were running EOL operating systems (WIN7), as well as a general lack of antivirus and encryption measures.

We were protected by the fact that Google’s software and hardware both had built-in security features that we needed to stave off sophisticated attackers. For example, Chrome OS automatically updates to the latest security update and encrypts data living outside the cloud on the hardware. These features protected us from security-related disruptions, letting us securely move a huge library of file shares and emails across thousands of accounts to Google Chrome OS in just four months.

A year later, in March 2021, we migrated the enterprise over to Google Workspace and saw an immediate reduction in spam by 30% from the inherent built-in AI/ML. This meant staff were less likely to receive (and click through) phishing attempts. My team could connect, create, and collaborate easily and securely—even as more of us were working from home and needed to access sensitive data remotely. 

Leveling the playing field

As an organization, we were surprised by how many team members didn’t have personal computers at home. We quickly decided that if we needed team members to work from home, the health network would have to supply hardware. Chromebooks’ lower price tag compared to PCs—on top of their built-in security controls—allowed us to purchase, deploy, and support that initial distribution of 3,000 Chromebooks to team members in less than three weeks, providing devices to every eligible remote employee instead of just a select few. This was vital to reaching our equitable technology goal as part of our diversity and inclusion initiative: everybody has the same tools to do good work.

When all employees have what they need to do their jobs well, we get better patient outcomes. Before we began this cloud adoption journey, patient and staff experiences were different within the hospitals and outside of them. 

Now it’s the same wherever our staff is, and we’ve seen efficiency and accessibility benefits extend to the patient side. For example, we built a web-based contact center that supports 80 locations that use Workspace and Chrome OS devices. Since customer service, admin, and providers are all on the same system, it has become a one-stop shop for patients.

Furthermore, through the Grow with Google program, we were able to provide another benefit to employees that drove our equity goals. Google trained 50 non-IT staff members—from environmental services, food and nutrition, and other non-tech areas who were interested in making a career change to IT—on the Google products we were using. They may not have thought about switching to a career in IT before the Grow with Google program came to our organization, but through this partnership, they now have that opportunity.

A strategic, long-term partner

With any large-scale rollout, the work doesn’t end once laptops are in employee hands. Google has shown their commitment to long-term collaboration as they continuously optimize their products for the unique needs of healthcare providers and go the extra mile in tailoring tools to our staff’s workflows. 

For example, on the Chrome OS side, the Google team has helped our registration desks and document centers with device integration for hardware like credit card readers and e-signature pads. They’ve also helped us meet security and privacy requirements mandated by state and federal governments around HIPAA, Medicaid, and Medicare reimbursements. Over this next year, we’ll look at a feature roadmap with Google Cloud to deliver further enhancements, iterating on the product itself to meet our needs for the present and the future.

Delivering the future of healthcare

The benefits we’ve seen around security and usability—and the ability to provide all staff with equal access to Google’s technology—are why we’re expanding our partnership with Google to both the administrative and clinical sides of HMH. In addition to further Google rollouts with corporate, next year we’re distributing Chromebooks to all 350 of our ambulatory clinics.

We’re also working with the Google professional services team to create a custom AI model that analyzes 3D mammogram images. This AI model will enable two providers to read mammograms—which adheres to international best practices but is currently rare in the US—without requiring additional time. Conducting double readings of mammograms will yield better health outcomes for our patients, such as a lower patient recall rate and an increased accuracy in detecting breast cancer.

We’re currently building the model using a variety of Google Cloud products, including Cloud Healthcare API. Once complete, this model is expected to be trained, deployed, and maintained in Google’s Vertex AI, allowing our providers to be more productive as they make clinical decisions with AI support. As the model is proven over time, we plan to make the predictive services accessible to other healthcare organizations.

With Google, we’re able to achieve a unified architecture for storing data as well as training and deploying AI models, which enable our staff to work more efficiently and securely from anywhere. While I may not be able to predict the future as accurately as AI can, I foresee our continued partnership with Google as a key part of HMH’s improved provider and patient outcomes.