Google Picks Up The Tab For Cloud Migrations Orchestrated by CloudEndure

In a first-of-its-kind partnership, Google earlier this month started financing migrations to its cloud performed by CloudEndure, an Israeli-American developer of an advanced replication technology.

The arrangement suggests large cloud providers might find it a good investment to absorb the costs of third-party software that potential customers would use to move workloads onto their platforms.

CloudEndure, a startup specializing in enterprise workload mobility, offers a conversion engine that moves any workload running in a Windows or Linux environment, without interruption, to just about any target cloud, said Gonen Stein, CloudEndure's vice president of business development.

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"We are a means to an end for them," Stein said of Google Cloud Platform. "We are an enabler and accelerator of workloads being moved over to their cloud."

The company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2012 and is now run from an office in New York. The conversion engine it developed transfers boot volumes through continuous block-level replication.

"That means you can support any application natively. That's something no one does in today's ecosystem with regards to cloud," Stein said. "We've made ourselves agnostic to any application, which makes life easy for enterprises with really complex applications."

CloudEndure allows live workloads to be migrated with minimal operational disruption to most major clouds, including Google's Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack environments.

The product is also employed for disaster recovery, providing a near-zero recovery point objective and recovery time objective, Stein said.

Enterprises concerned about cloud lock-in are driving demand for the product, Stein told CRN.

"We not only allow them to move into the cloud, but also allow them to move back from the cloud, either to on-premises or other cloud providers," Stein said.

Google's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, Compute Engine, is a popular target for CloudEndure's software. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google realized that by funding its use, it could recover costs quickly through hosting fees, according to Stein.

Customers that want to move workloads to Compute Engine can find CloudEndure via the Google landing page. CloudEndure will support the migration, and put the bill on Google's tab.

The arrangement with Google is unique, but easily extendible to other cloud providers, Stein told CRN. As long as the application is running in Linux or Windows, CloudEndure can replicate it.

The free service allows Google's channel partners to offer businesses another incentive for adopting cloud, Stein said.

CloudEndure wants to go to market primarily through its channel and the channels of its cloud partners, he said.

"We're not trying to provide services day and night, because it's not what we do," Stein said. "We've signed partners who have experienced a lot of pain in the past by using other tools."

That burgeoning ecosystem using the product to execute migrations includes a range of partners, from large systems integrators like Capgemini and 2nd Watch to smaller MSPs.

Meredith Knowles, director of partner development for Cloud Technology Partners, told CRN the cloud consultant based in Boston turns to CloudEndure to transfer live workloads to public clouds, without disruption and with minimal downtime.

Cloud Technology Partners has seen significant customer interest in migrating workloads to Google Cloud Platform of late, and the partnership will drive demand, she said.

"Google and CloudEndure’s cloud migration funding program allows CTP’s customers to remove procurement friction and further accelerate their cloud adoption," she said via email.

PUBLISHED NOV. 25, 2015