Google has launched its European Transfer Appliance beta testing programme aimed at helping businesses move their apps on legacy infrastructure to the search giant's cloud platform.
The high-capacity server is suitable for moving workloads and data of sizes in excess of 20TB. This process would normally take a week or more, but Google claims its Transfer Appliance can complete the task much faster, although it hasn't revealed just how quickly.
In Europe, Google is offering its Transfer Appliance in a 100TB configuration, although the total usable capacity is 200TB. It'll launch a 480TB version shortly for businesses with an even larger amount of data to migrate. That larger appliance will offer a total usable capacity of a petabyte.
The cloud giant explained its Transfer Appliance has been used by a range of businesses, including for those needing to move large datasets, such as satellite imagery and audio files. It's also a great option for migrating Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) clusters to its Google Cloud Platform.
"We see lots of users run their powerful Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop clusters on GCP with Cloud Dataproc, a managed Spark and Hadoop service that allows you to create clusters quickly, then hand off cluster management to the service," Ben Chong, product manager at Google Cloud Platform said.
Used with NFS volumes, HDFS data can be easily pushed to Google Transfer Appliance using Apache DistCp. Once the data is copied, the appliance can be sent to Google to upload the data to GCP.
Businesses wanting to use Transfer Appliance to migrate their data can request one from their GCP Console.
