Google spent much of 2016 trying to persuade enterprises that it truly meant business when it came to the cloud.
Part of this strategy saw the company move forward with a number of acquisitions and a ramping up of enterprise capabilities. One of the areas it focused on was to provide capabilities that would please Windows developers.
The company moved ahead with this strategy by making tools like Visual Studio and PowerShell available on the Google Cloud Platform, and by deploying the latest version of Windows Server onto the Google Compute Engine.
Google is now moving this strategy a step forward by announcing pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on Compute Engine.
Google’s also added support for SQP Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups and persistent disk snapshots integrated with Volume Shadow Copy Service on Windows Server. Plus, all of its Window Server images are now enabled with Windows Remote Management support, including Windows Server Core 2016 and 2012 R2 images.
Basically what all this means is that Google wants to tap into the market of users that have Windows in their data centres.
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The potential benefit of this for customers is that they can now launch pre-configured virtual machines running any of these products on GCP, pay for them by the minute, or bring an existing SQL Server license that has already been paid for.
This also means that customers have an alternative option to solely using Microsoft in order to use its products.
Amruta Gulanikar, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform, said on the company’s blog: “GCP’s expanded support for SQL Server images and high availability are our latest efforts to improve Windows support on Compute Engine, and to build a cloud environment for enterprise Windows that leads the industry.”
The list of announcements coming out of the company are another advancement of the company showing to businesses that it is enterprise ready and can take on customers that are already using these Microsoft capabilities in large scale production.
