Announcing Filestore Enterprise, for your most demanding apps

As more organizations move to Google Cloud, they need to consider their storage architecture—particularly for applications that they plan to lift and shift. The fact is that many legacy applications can’t use cloud-based object storage like Cloud Storage, and instead require a file- or block-based offering. 

Today, we’re announcing Filestore Enterprise, a fully managed cloud-native NFS solution that lets you confidently deploy critical file-based applications in Google Cloud, backed by a Service Level Agreement that delivers 99.99% regional availability. Originally launched in 2018, the Filestore product family now includes: 

• Filestore Basic for file sharing, software development, and GKE workloads

• Filestore High Scale for high performance computing (HPC) application requirements such as genome sequencing, and financial-services trading analysis 

• Filestore Enterprise for critical applications (e.g., SAP) and GKE workloads

With its 99.99% regional-availability SLA, Filestore Enterprise is designed for applications that demand high availability. With a few mouse clicks (or a few lines of gCloud CLI or API calls), you can simply provision NFS shares that are seamlessly synchronously replicated across three zones within a region. In the event that any zone within the region becomes unavailable, Filestore Enterprise continues to transparently serve data to the application with no operational intervention on your part. 

To further protect critical data, Filestore also lets you take periodic snapshots of the file system and retain a desired number of recovery points. With Filestore, you can easily recover an individual file or an entire file system in less than 10 minutes from any of the prior snapshot recovery points. 

Filestore Enterprise in action with SAP

SAP is a good example of a critical application that relies on both block (database tier) and file (application tier) storage. Recently Google and SAP announced our joint partnership to help organizations migrate SAP to Google Cloud, and the availability of Filestore Enterprise is an important enabler of that partnership. 

Last year, Google and Sabre announced a 10-year partnership to build the future of travel.

“As we continue our IT application modernization and migration projects, we intend to retire our data centers and run our applications and infrastructure in Google Cloud. To do so we need highly reliable storage for SAP, the stateful applications we’re deploying on GKE, and to support our travel and hospitality solution businesses,” said Patrick Uckermark, Sr. Director Enterprise Architecture at Sabre. “I’m looking forward to migrating off our legacy on-premises storage vendors that require complex storage configuration and management. I plan to utilize Filestore Enterprise for its ease of use, regional availability, and snapshot capabilities to support SAP, GKE, and our other critical applications.” 

For critical applications like SAP, both the database and application tiers need to be highly available. To satisfy this requirement, you can deploy the SAP database tier to Persistent Disk, in multiple zones using native database high availability. Similarly, SAP NetWeaver application tier, which requires shared files across many VMs, can be deployed to Filestore Enterprise, which replicates the data across multiple zones within a region. The end result is a highly available three-tier mission-critical application architecture.

IT organizations are also increasingly deploying stateful applications in containers on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This often causes them to rethink which storage infrastructure to use to support those applications. Based on application requirements, today you can use Persistent Disk (block), Filestore Basic or Enterprise (file), and/or Cloud Storage (object). Filestore Enterprise, with its managed Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, allows organizations that require multiple GKE Pods to have shared file access, providing an increased level of availability for mission-critical workloads. (We also announced Backup for GKE in Preview today.) 

SADA Systems is a three-time Google Cloud Reseller Partner of the Year and has migrated thousands of companies to Google Cloud. “We work with many organizations embarking on a cloud migration strategy and they require a combination of block, object, and file storage solutions to satisfy their diverse application requirements,'' said Miles Ward, CTO, SADA. “Our team is looking forward to working with our customers to leverage Filestore Enterprise for their GKE workloads and experience the simplicity of a cloud-native NFS solution. Additionally, the 99.99% regional availability will be extremely valuable to our customers looking to run more mission-critical applications in Google Cloud.”

To get started with Filestore Enterprise, register for our October 6th, Explore What's New with Google Cloud Storage webinar and Google Cloud Next ‘21 INF206 breakout session, where Sabre’s Patrick Uckermark will share more about how they intend to use Filestore to support their modernization journey.