Latest Transfer Appliance enables fast, simple and secure data movement
Abhishek Lal
Product Manager, Google Cloud
Overseeing a cloud migration is a tough job, but moving your actual data there doesn’t have to be. Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of our latest Transfer Appliance for the US, EU and Singapore regions, providing a simple, secure, cost-effective and offline way to transfer petabytes of data from data centers and field locations into Google Cloud.
With Transfer Appliance, you get secure, high-performance data transfer in a tamper-resistant, ruggedized design. All-SSD storage lets you write data fast, while support for CMEK (Customer Managed Encryption Keys) and AES 256 encryption protects data while it is in flight, and helps you comply with industry-specific regulations (ISO, SOC, PCI & HIPAA).
Every day, customers are choosing to move their data to Google Cloud and take advantage of our fully-managed, globally available Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage is built by Google engineers and gives you the same reliability and performance as the storage used by Google’s most popular products like Youtube and Workspace. Getting your data into Cloud Storage is just the beginning. Once your data is stored in Cloud Storage, you can easily connect to powerful data analytics products like BigQuery, or derive intelligence from your data with products like the recently launched Vertex AI platform.
Transfer Appliance use cases
Whether you have slow or unreliable connectivity, or can’t afford to disrupt your network, moving large quantities of data can be a notoriously fraught process. For customers with limited network bandwidth or connectivity, transferring large amounts of data over your network can monopolize your connection for a long time, impacting production systems' performance for days or weeks on end in the case of larger transfers. Because you copy your data onto Transfer Appliance and then ship it, you can move your data to Google Cloud without disrupting regular business operations.
Another great use case for the Transfer Appliance is customers with remote or mobile locations, like ships or other field environments. Collect data locally, and once at the dock or port, simply ship the data to Google Cloud for processing or archiving.
Google Cloud customer ADT provides residential, small business and commercial security, fire protection, and monitoring services to their customers. As ADT grew, it became clear that valuable data was being duplicated across systems and teams. Optimizing accessibility to this data presented an opportunity to extract better insights and do it more efficiently. To make their data more accessible they decided to migrate their Oracle and Hadoop instances to Cloud Storage and use BigQuery for their data warehouse.
But when it came time to move, they realized that transferring the data over their VPN posed some challenges. Daniel Marolt, Senior Manager of Information at ADT says, “it quickly became clear our VPN connection would not be the most effective method to transfer our data out of our data center. We needed some way to get hundreds of terabytes of data to cloud quickly and cost-effectively, without disrupting regular business operations. Google’s Transfer Appliance allowed us to get our data into Google Cloud securely, quickly and easily. We received the appliance, uploaded our data directly from our data center, shipped it back, and days later our data lake was available in Cloud Storage.”
How Transfer Appliance works Using Transfer Appliance starts with submitting an order from the Google Cloud Console. Then, to prepare for the transfer, specify the destination Cloud Storage bucket and KMS key for encryption. Google Cloud validates the data-source location’s needs such as power and space, racks or shelves to place appliances. Then the appropriate appliance and cables are shipped to meet your requirements. Once the appliance is on site and ready to connect to your network, you simply mount the NFS share exposed by the appliance and copy the data. Then, once all the data copy operations are completed, seal the appliance for shipping; this finalization step protects the appliance and your data from tampering in transit.
Back at a Google Cloud processing facility, we attest to the integrity of the appliance, and move the data securely into the destination bucket. We inform you of the successful completion of the transfer session as soon as these operations are done. This typically takes 1 to 2 weeks to complete depending on which Transfer Appliance you selected.
You can ship Transfer Appliances to multiple locations in parallel in capacities of 40TB and 300TB, depending on your needs. Your local network limits the number of appliances you can effectively use at a location, and the available transfer capacity of your source data systems. If you have recurring data transfer needs, you can also rent multiple appliances in stages, to ensure your data collection operations can move data at a steady pace.
Get started today
Google Cloud's suite of transfer offerings are designed to make it easy to move your data from other clouds, on-premises or between Google Cloud regions. However, in some scenarios, you may not have the connectivity to get your data to where it needs to go—that's where the transfer appliance can help.
Read more about Transfer Appliance or order one from your Cloud Console today.
