Google LLC said today it’s expanding availability of its Bare Metal Solution to five new regions, and that it will add four more sites before the end of the year.

Announced in November, Google’s Bare Metal Solution provides access to specialized hardware for running workloads such as Oracle databases close to Google Cloud infrastructure.

The service is now available in Ashburn, Virginia; Frankfurt; London; Los Angeles, California; and Sydney, and will be coming to Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tokyo by the end of 2020.

Bare Metal Solution is designed for enterprises running mission-critical workloads that have traditionally provdn to be very difficult to move to the cloud. Managed service providers and other partners can provision public cloud services directly on dedicated physical servers.

In a blog post, Google Cloud Product Manager Gurmeet Goindi Sr. said Oracle databases were a prime example of such workloads.

“The idea is that Bare Metal Solution moves workloads from organizations’ data centers to Google Cloud, and does so easily,” he wrote. “This can even include hauling legacy applications into the cloud – traditionally a daunting feat.”

Google’s Bare Metal Solution is based on several partner technologies, including NetApp Inc.’s storage hardware, Actifio Inc.’s backup and recovery technology and Atos SE’s orchestration, management and infrastructure services.

“Bare Metal Solution can lower your implementation timelines and improve your overall user experience,” Goindi said.

The service provides access to servers that use second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors that are available in a range of sizes.

“Depending on your needs, you can choose a bare metal server with as few as 16 cores, or all the way up to 112 cores with 3 terabytes of DRAM, all to handle your most demanding workloads,” he wrote. “These servers are certified by almost all major software companies. We deploy Bare Metal Solution in a region extension with less than two millisecond latency to Google Cloud; in most cases we measured the latency to be sub-millisecond.”

The infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, power and cooling, is all maintained and managed by Google Cloud. The service is available via a subscription pricing model.

In addition to the wider availability announced today, Goindi also announced a new automation tool to help organizations manage specialist bare-metal cloud workloads.

“Using open-source Ansible IT automation, we created a toolkit to help you quickly install your databases, manage storage and set up your backups, and have made this toolkit available to everyone as open source on GitHub,” he said.

Image: Google