Published on searchstorage.techtarget.com. Read the full article here.
The sheer number of file services among all three providers, along with myriad smaller cloud providers battling over the remaining market, means Google faces an uphill battle in luring enterprise customers into its cloud variant, said Dave Raffo, a senior analyst for Evaluator Group.
“The cloud file market is extremely competitive,” Raffo said. “There are so many managed services right now. … The new file service can help, but it’s hard to convince companies already using file storage in another cloud to switch over.”
Specifically, Google faces competition from three possible file server offerings from AWS alone by partner vendors such as NetApp and Lustre. This also includes similar file vendors on Azure as well as cloud NAS vendors already tapping into public clouds such as Nasuni, Ctera and Panzura. Even then, businesses can potentially meet their needs in other cloud tiers offered by GCP, according to Raffo.
“Having so many choices is good for customers but also requires more research to compare options,” he said. “In a lot of cases, they go with the cloud provider or on-prem vendor they already know and feel comfortable with.”
The new Backup for GKE, Raffo pointed out, is unique in offering developers a way to back up their containers in the public cloud without using additional apps such as Portworx PX-Backup or Veeam’s Kasten.
“Developers usually aren’t familiar with traditional backup software,” Raffo said. “So this helps them if they can do their backups through Kubernetes.”
