Originally reported by NetworkWorld (October 2017).
Overview: What the Google–Scale Computing Partnership Delivers
Google and Scale Computing announced a partnership to make it significantly easier for small and mid-sized businesses to extend their on-premises data centers into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The result is a joint platform called Cloud Unity, which bridges Scale’s HC3 hyper-converged infrastructure software with Google Compute Engine.
The target audience is clear: organizations that lack the engineering resources to architect and manage a complex hybrid cloud environment on their own. For those businesses, Cloud Unity aims to reduce the operational overhead of maintaining a separate, dedicated disaster recovery site.
What Is HC3 and How Does Cloud Unity Work?
Scale Computing’s HC3 is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) product that merges compute, storage, and virtualization into a single, tightly integrated appliance. Rather than managing separate servers, storage arrays, and hypervisors, HC3 consolidates these layers into a cluster that is managed through a single interface.
Cloud Unity extends this model into Google’s infrastructure:
- Google-hosted cluster: Instead of purchasing additional physical hardware for a disaster recovery site, an organization can build an HC3-compatible cluster using Google Compute Engine resources.
- SD-WAN connectivity: Cloud Unity establishes a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) connection between the on-premises Scale environment and the Google-hosted cluster, so the remote GCP environment appears as just another cluster on the same local area network.
- VXLAN encryption: Traffic between the customer’s site and Google’s data center is encrypted using VXLAN, providing a secure overlay network tunnel without requiring dedicated hardware VPN appliances.
The practical effect is that a small business can have a live, cloud-hosted mirror of its data center that behaves like an on-site cluster — without hiring specialized cloud networking staff to build and maintain it.
Why This Matters for Disaster Recovery and Backup
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) deployments have a well-known cost problem: dedicated DR hardware sits idle almost all of the time, consuming budget that could otherwise fund new projects. Cloud-based DR changes this equation by replacing a fixed capital expenditure with a variable operational cost — you pay for cloud resources primarily when you actually need them for failover or testing.
For smaller organizations, the specific advantages of Cloud Unity include:
- Lower capital cost: No need to purchase and rack a second set of physical hardware at a colocation facility.
- Operational simplicity: The Google-hosted cluster is managed through the same HC3 interface as on-premises nodes, reducing the learning curve.
- Elastic capacity: Cloud resources can be scaled up during a real disaster event and scaled back down during normal operations.
- Reduced idle cost: DR infrastructure no longer needs to run at full capacity around the clock just to be available.
Google Expands Its Hybrid Cloud Strategy
This partnership reflects a broader strategic shift for Google Cloud. Through most of its early cloud history, Google positioned GCP as a pure public cloud offering — a contrast with Microsoft Azure and, to a lesser extent, Amazon Web Services, both of which had made earlier investments in hybrid and on-premises integrations.
The Scale Computing deal, alongside a concurrent partnership with Nutanix (another major HCI vendor), signals that Google recognized an opportunity it had been slower to pursue: meeting enterprise and mid-market customers where their workloads actually live, rather than requiring a full migration to the public cloud.
Hybrid cloud is particularly important for organizations with regulatory constraints, latency-sensitive applications, or significant investments in existing on-premises infrastructure that cannot be migrated quickly or economically.
Scale Computing’s Technology Stack: KVM Over VMware
One notable technical detail is Scale Computing’s choice of hypervisor. Rather than VMware ESXi — the dominant hypervisor in enterprise data centers — Scale’s HC3 platform is built on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), the open-source Linux hypervisor. This keeps licensing costs lower and avoids VMware’s per-socket or per-core pricing, which is a meaningful advantage for cost-sensitive small and mid-market buyers.
The tradeoff is that HC3 operates in a different ecosystem from the large VMware installed base. Organizations already standardized on VMware vSphere would face a platform change if they adopted Scale’s solution — a factor that limits Scale’s ability to displace incumbents in large enterprises where HPE, Dell, and VMware have deep relationships.
However, for businesses that are not yet deeply committed to VMware, or that are evaluating HCI for the first time, the open-source foundation is a selling point rather than a limitation.
Key Takeaways
- Cloud Unity integrates Scale Computing’s HC3 HCI platform with Google Compute Engine, making GCP appear as a native cluster extension of an on-premises environment.
- SD-WAN and VXLAN are the core networking technologies enabling seamless, encrypted connectivity between sites.
- The solution primarily targets small and mid-sized businesses that need affordable disaster recovery without dedicated DR hardware.
- The partnership represents Google’s strategic move toward hybrid cloud, complementing a similar deal with Nutanix made around the same period.
- Scale Computing uses KVM rather than VMware, keeping costs lower but limiting direct interoperability with VMware-centric enterprise environments.