Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, April 26, 2024

Google, HCL Expand Cloud Migration Partnership 

Google Cloud and HCL Technologies are expanding their partnership to integrate the Indian company’s hybrid cloud data warehouse into the search giant’s public cloud platform.

The expanded partnership brings HCL’s Actian Avalanche hybrid cloud data warehouse to Google Cloud. The business intelligence platform would allow users to migrate legacy data warehouses, including IBM Netezza and Oracle Exadata, to Google Cloud using the Google’s Anthos application platform.

Anthos, formerly Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) cloud services platform, combinesKubernetes, the Istio service mesh and related open-source components into a framework aimed at achieving interoperability between the Google cloud and on-premise infrastructure.

HCL Actian also includes native integration with Google Cloud’s Looker business intelligence and analytics platform, which the cloud vendor acquired in June 2019. The HCL cloud data warehouse is also integrated with a large list of software services and enterprise applications, the companies said Wednesday (Sept. 16) in announcing the expanded cloud services partnership.

The result of the integration will be faster analysis of real-time operational data while reducing infrastructure costs, according to Raghu Chakravarthi, Actian’s chief product officer.

The former Actian Corp. was acquired by HCL and Sumera Equity Partners in 2018. HCL, Noida, India, controls 80 percent of the hybrid data management vendor. The buyers acquired Actian’s hybrid cloud data integration platform along with its hybrid database geared toward operational analytics applications.

The Google-HCL partnership targets growing enterprise demand to migrate legacy data warehouses to hybrid clouds as a way to scale operations and boost performance. While more companies are shifting database services to the cloud, legacy data warehouse vendor Oracle claims a back log of orders for its Exadata hardware.

Meanwhile, other database vendors are offering connections that would link legacy mainframes and other relational data stores to streaming analytics platforms like Apache Spark.

A database connector upgrade unveiled this week by real-time NoSQL database vendor Aerospike links legacy infrastructure to Spark, Apache Kafka, Pulsar and the Java Messaging Service. Those links could, for example, allow mission-critical data architectures to scan hundreds of terabytes of data using real-time Spark streaming, the company claimed.

Last year, HCL and Google Cloud announced the launch Google Cloud Ecosystem to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption. HCL has since established three dedicated Google Cloud Native Labs in New York, London and the New Delhi area.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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