Dell Technologies Inc. has placed storage hardware in Google LLC data centers as part of a collaboration with the tech giant to better support joint customers with hybrid cloud environments.

The partnership, revealed today, headlines a series of new additions to Dell’s portfolio. Dell worked with Google to deploy Isilon storage systems running OneFS file storage software in the search giant’s cloud data centers. Companies can connect these systems to their Google Cloud environment and use them to hold file-based data such as spreadsheets.

“OneFS for Google Cloud is a native Google Cloud offering within the Google Cloud intranet, based on Isilon technology,” Claudio Fahey, chief artificial intelligence solutions architect for Dell EMC, wrote in a technical white paper. “It provides terabit networking and sub-millisecond latency between the Isilon hardware and Google Compute Engine services.”

According to Dell, a single OneFS for Google Cloud deployment holds up to 50 petabytes of data. Dell’s pitch to customers is that the offering lets them connect their cloud environment to existing on-premises Isilon systems without any complex technical changes. That, in turn, makes it easier to adopt a hybrid cloud model. 

“Now, companies can easily move and access high performance computing and demanding workloads, as large as 50 petabytes, in a single filesystem between on-premises Dell EMC Isilon filesystems and Google Cloud without having to make changes or adjustments to their applications,” Dell EMC storage engineering executive Joe CaraDonna wrote in a blog post.

Companies can copy important files from Isilon systems to Google Cloud as a way of backing them up. According to Dell, another use case that OneFS supports is training artificial intelligence models. An enterprise could import training data from on-premises systems and use Google Cloud’s vast computing resources to develop a model faster than it could using its own hardware. 

In a series of internal AI training benchmark tests, “Isilon performance was better than or equal to Google Cloud Filestore in all cases,” Dell’s Claudio Fahey wrote in the technical paper. Firestore is Google Cloud’s native file system service.

Integrating with the major public clouds has become a major priority for data center suppliers now that their enterprise customers are shifting a growing number of workloads off-premise. For that reason, Dell may also bring OneFS to other major clouds besides Google in the future. That’s the path NetApp Inc. has taken with its competing Cloud Volumes file storage service, which is available on Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.

Dell announced a number of other updates today alongside the tie-up with Google. The company added three new models to its Edge family of networking appliances and expanded Dell Technologies On Demand, its subscription-based hardware purchasing and renting program, with more buying options. 

Image: Google