With a series of fresh announcements today, Google is looking to register itself in the enterprise IT domain, an area largely dominated by Microsoft and the likes. And yes, if you hadn’t guessed, Google’s first target is Microsoft itself, as the company has today announced the launch of new Windows Virtual Machines on its Cloud platform, letting IT Pros run Windows server and enterprise tools on Google’s platform.
First up, Google has announced support support for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on the Cloud Platform. Not just this, the search giant is also announcing support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups and persistent disk snapshots integrated with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows Server.
Next up, all of Google’s Windows Server images are now enabled with Windows Remote Management support, including the Windows Server Core 2016 and 2012 R2 images.
While that was the technical aspect of the announcement, for you as an IT pro, this would mean that you can now launch Compute Engine Virtual Machines with Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition pre-installed, and pay by the minute for SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server licenses. Additionally, customers can also choose to bring their own licenses for SQL Server Enterprise.
The step is n both Google’s and user fronts. Talking about users first, this would give them an opportunity to work with Microsoft’s products, without getting essentially bound to be with Microsoft. In fact, this is the kind of ideology a lot of customers have already conveyed to Chris Sells, who is the lead product manager for Google Cloud Developer Tools. He says,
Microsoft provides these capabilities and they own Windows and SQL Server, but we are finding that lots of customers are looking for alternatives to Microsoft.
On Google’s front, this aggressive push into the cloud — which gained momentum post former VMWare Diane Green’s entry to lead Google Cloud — is a rather concerted effort to register itself as a major player in the enterprise tech domain.
Sells adds,
We want to make sure we have a great place to put their data. If it’s in SQL Server and they want to keep it there, we support them.
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