The growth were seeing across [Google] Cloud is underpinned by the benefit AI provides for our customers, Ruth Porat, president, chief investment officer and CFO, said during Google parent Alphabets first-quarter 2024 earnings call Thursday.

Google parent Alphabet credited its strong first fiscal quarter of the year to solid Google Search and Google Cloud revenue.

For the first quarter of 2024 ended March 31, Google Cloud, the worlds third largest cloud computing company, generated $9.57 billion, up an impressive 28 percent from $7.45 billion a year ago.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that cloud business continues to grow as the company brings the best of Google artificial intelligence to enterprise customers around the world.

Our differentiation in cloud begins with our AI Hypercomputer, which provides efficient and cost-effective infrastructure to train models. Today, more than 60 percent of funded GenAI startups and nearly 90 percent of GenAI unicorns are Google Cloud customers, Pichai said.

As an example of the momentum the company is seeing in cloud thanks to AI, the Google One offering, which bundles cloud storage, AI capabilities and other Google features in one shareable plan, has crossed more than 100 million paid subscribers. In the first quarter, Google also recently introduced a premium AI plan called Gemini Advanced.

[Related: Google Cloud Applying AI To Our Whole Partner Incentive Portfolio: Google Exec]

Google during its first-quarter 2024 earnings call Thursday pointed to popular brands such as Beyer, Mercedes Benz and Walmart that are seeing generative AI success with Google Cloud, Pichai said.

The company over the past eight months has launched more than 1,000 new products and features as part of the Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud was not profitable until the company reported in first-quarter 2023 that the segment had generated $191 million in operating income. Prior to that, the company was investing billions each quarter to expand its global cloud infrastructure and services reach.

Google Cloud generates its sales from the Google Cloud Platform, platform services, infrastructure and collaboration tools such as Google Workspace. It takes in revenue primarily from consumption-based fees and subscriptions from Google Cloud Platform services, Workspace tools and other services.

Ruth Porat, the companys president, chief investment officer and CFO, said that Google Clouds performance during the first quarter reflects strong demand for Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and offerings, as well as for Googles Workspace productivity tools.

The growth were seeing across cloud is underpinned by the benefit AI provides for our customers. We continue to invest aggressively while remaining focused on profitable growth, she said.

Gemini, Googles AI-powered agent, is built into Google Workspace tools, including Gmail, Docs and Sheets. Google recently introduced Gemini for Meetings and Messaging and Gemini for Workspace security.

Customers are choosing Workspace because they have deep trust in our powerful security and privacy features. Our cloud business is now widely seen as the leader in cybersecurity, Pichai added.

Google announced earlier this month that it would be consolidating the teams that focus on building AI models across Google Research and Google DeepMind in a move the company said would further accelerate progress in AI.

Google Cloud, which delivered operating income of $900 million during the quarter, accounted for nearly 12 percent of Googles total revenue of $80.54 billion in first-quarter 2024.

Google bested Wall Street expectations of $78.59 billion during its first fiscal quarter of the year. The company also beat Wall Streets expectations for YouTube advertising revenue and cloud revenue.

Parent Alphabets stock climbed more than 12 percent in after-hours activity on news of the earnings results.

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Google Cloud Posts 28 Percent Revenue Jump In Q1 2024 Thanks To AI, Says CEO - CRN

Dropbox has announced the release of new integrations with Microsoft, including real-time co-authoring of Microsoft files from within Dropbox.

According to the file sharing and cloud storage solution, Dropbox, teams can already access a beta version of Co-Authoring that will let them make live edits to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from the web and mobile.

As part of Dropboxs Spring Release, it is also launching an enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams that allows users to search, upload, share, and preview content in Dropbox from Microsoft 365.

On top of this, users will gain access to a plugin extension for Copilot for Microsoft 365 that can automatically answer questions and generate summaries.

Introducing the updates via its online blog, Dropbox explains how it used Virtual Firsts example to improve collaboration experiences: The reality of modern work is that teams are spread across multiple locations, time zones, and even companies.

The simplest tasks, like collaborating on content and responding to feedback, can be a massive headache. More than ever, our customers need technology that makes teamwork effortless.

Using the lessons weve learned from Virtual First, our playbook for distributed work, weve designed new tools that make it easier to find, organise, and share your contentall in one secure place.

Today, were announcing new top-requested features to give you the control, flexibility, and speed to do your best work, all from Dropbox.

These are all excellent feature upgrades that will no doubt add a major appeal when organisations that use Microsoft Teams are weighing up which cloud storage provider to side with.

The capabilities are unsurprisingly already available on Microsofts own OneDrive cloud storage solution.

Last month, Microsoft revealed for example that it will begin rolling out Copilot in OneDrive in late April 2024.

The new tool will allow users to quickly retrieve information from files in their OneDrive.

Available for work and school customers with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, Copilot in OneDrive will be able to accessible from OneDrive for web and file viewer in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

As well as accessing files, OneDrive users will also be able to leverage the Copilot plugin to create tables, outlines, FAQs, enhance content in a document, presentation, or spreadsheet, summarise files, generate insights, and more.

Microsoft also added a collaborative content upgrade, whereby customers with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license would also be able to include Copilot-generated summaries when sharing documents with their co-workers.

Although it is always going to be tough competing with Microsoft on integrations with its own products, Teams-based organisations may be drawn to Dropbox for other reasons.

In a recent Gartner comparison between Dropbox Business and OneDrive for Business, Dropbox scored higher on certain areas, such as user experience, ease of deployment, and content management. When it came to the overall rating, however, Gartner awarded OneDrive 4.5 out of five, just ahead of Dropboxs 4.4 out of five.

In December last year, Microsoft also launched the OneDrive for Teams App to replace the Teams Files app as a collaboration and productivity enhancement.

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Dropbox Adds Real-Time Co-Authoring to Microsoft Integrations - UC Today

During the recent Developer Week, Cloudflare announced that the object storage R2 now supports event notifications, which automatically trigger Workers in response to data changes. Additionally, the migration service Super Slurper now extends its support to Google Cloud Storage and a new infrequent access storage tier is available in private beta.

Presently in open beta, event notifications dispatch messages to a queue whenever there's a change to data within a bucket. These messages are subsequently received by a consumer Worker, allowing developers to define any subsequent actions needed. Matt DeBoard, Mengqi Chen, Siddhant Sinha, systems engineers at Cloudflare, and Erin Thames, product designer at Cloudflare, write:

The lifecycle of data often doesnt stop immediately after upload to an R2 bucket event data may need to be transformed and loaded into a data warehouse, media files may need to go through a post-processing step, etc. Were releasing event notifications for R2 in open beta to enable building applications and workflows driven by your changing data.

Source: Cloudflare blog

Designed for data lakes, storage for cloud-native applications, and web content, Cloudflare R2 enables developers to store unstructured data using S3-like APIs. Dubbed the zero egress fee object storage platform by Cloudflare to emphasize its main differentiator from competing globally distributed object storage services, R2 offers dynamic functionalities that integrate with Cloudflare Workers.

Released last year with support for Amazon S3 only, Super Slurper is a migration service that enables developers to move all their data to R2 in "one giant slurp" or "sip by sip" and now supports also Google Cloud Storage as a source. Migration jobs preserve custom object metadata from the source bucket by copying them on the migrated objects on R2 and do not delete any objects from the source bucket.

Initially released last year with support exclusively for Amazon S3, Super Slurper is a migration service that enables developers to transfer their data to R2 either in one comprehensive transfer or gradually. The service now extends its compatibility to Google Cloud Storage as a source. Migration jobs preserve custom object metadata from the source bucket by replicating them onto the migrated objects in R2.

The private beta release of the Infrequent Access storage class, a cost-effective option with comparable performance and durability, marked the third feature announcement for R2 during Developer Week. This new storage class can be assigned either through APIs or lifecycle policies and is tailored for scenarios involving infrequently accessed data, such as long-tail user-generated content or logs. DeBoard, Chen, Sinha, and Thames add:

In the future, we plan to automatically optimize storage classes for data so you can avoid manually creating rules and better adapt to changing data access patterns.

On Hacker News, user thrixton questions the pricing of the new tier:

So pricing is 1c / GB-month, compared to S3 IA at 1.25c / GB-month, a decent saving but not massive, no archive or deep archive options though, I wonder if / when these will come. What sort of negotiated rates can you get from AWS for bandwidth I wonder, at the moment, that seems like the only real benefit from CF I think.

While there are no egress fees on the class, a data retrieval fee of USD 0.01/GB (the same amount as AWS S3-IA) is charged when data in the Infrequent Access storage class is accessed.

While the Infrequent Access storage class does not incur egress fees, a data retrieval fee of USD 0.01/GB (equivalent to AWS S3-IA) is charged when data within this tier is retrieved.

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Cloudflare R2 Storage Introduces Event Notifications and Infrequent Access Storage Tier - InfoQ.com

Hitachi Vantaras Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One), a unified hybrid cloud storage product, has moved into the realm of the public cloud with AWS.

Update: SDS File and object info added. 18 April 2024.

The high-end and mid-range VSP arrays were previously built on proprietary hardware up until a few years ago, but Hitachi Vantara added software-defined features and support for commodity x86-based hardware. It then announced Virtual Storage Software Block, layered on top of SVOS and presenting a single data plane across Hitachi Vantaras mid-range, enterprise, and software-defined storage portfolio.

Hitachi Vantara said it would eventually extend into the public cloud. In February this year, all the storage products were being brought together under a hybrid VSP (Virtual Storage Platform) One brand. VSP One running on AWS now fulfills that aim of extending into the public cloud.

Octavian Tanase, chief product officer at Hitachi Vantara, said: Virtual Storage Platform One is transformational in the storage landscape because it unifies data and provides flexibility regardless of whether your data is in an on-premises, cloud, or software-defined environment.

Additionally, the platform is built with resiliency in mind, guaranteeing 100 percent data availability, modern storage assurance, and effective capacity across all its solutions, providing organizations with simplicity at scale and an unbreakable data foundation for hybrid cloud.

There is a single control plane, data plane, and data fabric with VSP One, and three products available initially:

We were told by a Hitachi V spokesperson: The Virtual Storage Platform One File is an appliance. We plan to offer SDS File in 2025. Note that HitachiContent Software for File is based on an OEM relationship whereas: Virtual Storage Platform One is home to our own IP only. Also: Longer term we will be offering Virtual Storage Platform One Object that will integrate file services as will our block offerings.In 2025 we will be launching the Virtual Storage Platform One Community that will be the home of our OEM and 3rd party offerings to build out a data platform into a custom solution.

Hitachi Vantara says VSP One features include:

Dan McConnell, Hitachi Vantara SVP for product management, said in a blog late last year: This announcement signals a major strategic direction for our company. Imagine a single data plane that spreads neatly across your organizations structured and unstructured data, from traditional hardware optimized arrays to scalable software defined, to cloud-hosted.

The unstructured data includes files and also objects and mainframe data, according to an eBook.

McConnell says VSP One will be infused with Hitachi Vantara machine learning models that enable administrators to not only query and pull insights from the infrastructure but to automate and augment processes, such as determining the best deployment architecture for an applications data.

Additional VSP One products will be available later this year. Various links off the Hitachi Vantara VSP One web page tell you more.

Sheila Rohras Hitachi Vantara is catching up with Dell, HPE, and NetApp as a long-term incumbent storage supplier embracing software-defined storage, commodity hardware, unified block, file and object storage, hybrid on-premises and public cloud availability, control planes, and a cloud-like operating model. We can expect VSP One to appear in the Azure and Google clouds and to support GenAI and retrieval-augmented generation.

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Hitachi Vantara brings VSP One hybrid cloud storage to AWS Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

The storage industry continues to rapidly change, and many vendors are indeed looking to provide ways to better extend and manage storage regardless of where it exists. Here are 100 vendors solution providers should have on their radar across software-defined storage; data recovery, observability and resiliency; and components.

Go back a few years ago, and measuring the growth of the data storage industry was easy. Industry watchers could just check the latest quarterly IDC or Gartner reports to see the storage hardware revenue or capacity of the storage industry as a whole and for each of the top players in the market.

Today, its not so simple. Data today may reside on a traditional dedicated on-premises storage array. It may be sitting on an industry-standard server configured via software to act as a storage array. It may be sitting on a public cloud, using either the cloud providers own technology or a traditional storage vendors cloud-native version of its array software. Or the data may be in between some on-premises and some cloud infrastructures, maybe even temporarily based on an applications needs.

All these changes have made data storage much more capable than in the past, said John Woodall, vice president and CTO of hybrid cloud at Dallas-based solution provider General Datatech.

First there was file storage, then file and block, Woodall said. Then it was hybrid marketplace offerings, and then it was hybrid multi-cloud and then a redefined unified, which is file, block, object and cloud. Cisco recently reported that 82 percent of enterprises are operating in a hybrid cloud model, meaning on-prem and one or more hyperscalers. Those in the cloud, I think it was 92 percent operate in a multi-cloud model. So every time you have a different technology, a different set of APIs, a different set of services, even though they might be in the same storage category, theyre different.

Now multiply that across compute, hypervisors, networking, security, on-premises, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and the idea of a hybrid cloud becomes the Nirvana, Woodall said.

The promise is simplified operations, easier-to-do infrastructure as code, a more consistent set of services, observability and all these other things, he said. To deliver on that compute, you can extend it using maybe VMware, VMware Cloud, or containers, to create a consistent model and operating model observability around the compute layer. But if you cant expand your storage, meaning the operations thereof, and the APIs and automation and infrastructure as code capabilities to make on-prem and cloud storage the same and extend the services of snapshots, replication, quality, etc., then you really have only extended your fabric at the compute and network layer, but the storage layer is still left to more variability.

Furthermore, Woodall said, users are now showing a preference for cloud-native technologies, doing things like going to their Chrome or other browser, clicking on their cloud console and consuming native services for everything, Woodall said. There are options for storage, but they are not as clean as for compute and networking, he said.

If we look back over the last 10, 20 years, storage vendors in general have responded with the ability to either provide observability and manageability of cloud-native storage resources, or provide their own version with primary or secondary storage either via a marketplace or via first-party technologies, he said. And so its a move in the right direction. It is an essential dynamic where we must see more maturity and less siloing. And thats where third parties or established vendors are providing an overlay for command and control irrespective of the underlying technology.

The storage industry continues to rapidly change, and many vendors are indeed looking to provide ways to better extend and manage storage regardless of where it exists.

Here are 100 vendors solution providers should have on their radar across software-defined storage; data recovery, observability and resiliency; and components.

The 50 Coolest Software-Defined Storage Vendors: The 2024 Storage 100 As part of CRNs 2024 Storage 100, here are 50 vendors bringing software capabilities, services and cloud connectivity to storage technology.

The 40 Coolest Data Recovery/Observability/Resiliency Vendors: The 2024 Storage 100 As part of CRNs 2024 Storage 100, here are 40 vendors taking their data management offerings to new heights.

The 10 Coolest Storage Component Vendors: The 2024 Storage 100 These 10 storage component vendors give software and data the right base on which to operate.

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Storage 100: The Digital Bridge Between The Cloud And On-Premises Worlds - CRN