Google borg gobbles Israeli cloud migration startup

Israeli multi-vendor cloud migration startup Velostrata might not be so agnostic about which data centres it shifts workloads to after agreeing to be gobbled by Google for an undisclosed financial sum.

Velostrata was launched in 2014 by CEO Issy Ben-Shaul and chief architect Ady Degany. Its tech decouples compute from storage and can move on-premises VMs to the cloud - AWS, Azure and latterly Google - without bulk-shifting the storage.

Back in an August 2015 interview with The Reg Velostrata said it uses “sophisticated read and Write-back multi-tier caching, fine-grained network and storage de-duplication, read-ahead, compression, predictive pre-fetching of workloads and more.

"Furthermore, we uniquely offer real-time streaming of boot images, which enables VMs to be up and running in minutes, versus weeks or months.”

The startup partnered with Google just last month in response, it said, to ramping enterprise demand in mass migrating on-premises workloads into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The GCP-Velostrata integration was provided free of charge and claimed to accelerate the speed of cloud migrations, often by more than five times than that of conventional approaches.

In a classic Victor Kiam moment, Google liked the experience so much it decided to slurp the company.

In a blog post, Google said the buy will beef up its "migration tools" and smooth the way for customers to "simplify their onboarding process to Google Cloud Platform, and easily migrate workloads to Google Compute Engine."

Google made no reference to clouds run by its rivals - as you'd expect - but added that customers can expect to:

"Adapt their workloads on-the-fly for cloud execution, and they can decouple their compute from storage without performance degradation. This means they can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud."

Velostrata previously swallowed $31.5m in funding in two rounds.

The firm's Israeli-based development people and San Mateo US office staff will join Google’s cloud crowd. You can read Velostrata and Google blogs about the deal.

The purchase is subject to closing conditions. ®