Run enterprise workloads without compromise

Today I am excited to share the general availability of the most comprehensive service level to date, Flex Unified in Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. With GA, Flex Unified is ready for production deployments that require predictable performance, guaranteed SLAs, high availability, and enterprise-grade data management. The service is available across 16 Google Cloud regions at GA and will be rolled out to the others in the coming months.

Flex Unified service level is purpose-built to serve enterprise workloads operating at cloud scale. It is built on industry-leading NetApp^® ONTAP^® data management software optimized to run on Google Cloud’s elastic hardware. Flex Unified brings together enterprise file and block workloads—NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP—into a single, fully managed storage service.

Customers can benefit from the versatility of Flex Unified across several use cases. Listed below are a few use cases for the Flex Unified service level that our customers are excited about.

Enterprises want to move selfmanaged databases to the cloud without refactoring applications or reworking operational processes. Flex Unified supports block storage via iSCSI and NVMe/TCP, with predictable sub-1msec latency, 160K IOPS, and 5 GiB/s throughput, while preserving familiar data protection and recovery workflows. Organizations can migrate database workloads to Google Cloud, retain application behavior, and optimize MS SQL TCO costs up to ~40% by scaling compute and storage independently.

Organizations running design, analytics, or dataintensive workloads need storage that can scale to very large capacities and high throughput in specific regions. Flex Unified large volume pools support datasets up to 20 PiBs and 22 GiB/s throughput under a single namespace with independent scaling of capacity and performance. Teams can place data close to compute, support high levels of concurrency, and expand workloads globally without redesigning data pipelines or storage architecture.

Enterprises want to adopt cloud storage without losing the governance, protection, and operational controls they rely on today. In ONTAP-mode, Flex Unified enables direct use of native ONTAP capabilities, including snapshots, replication, immutable data protection, auditing, and ransomware detection. This allows organizations to migrate workloads to Google Cloud while maintaining existing operational standards and compliance practices.

Businesses need strong availability guarantees and zonefailure protection while keeping storage costs under control. Flex Unified regional pools provide crosszone high availability with a 99.99% SLA and allow independent scaling of performance and capacity. Autotiering reduces cost to 3c/GiB/month by moving infrequently accessed data to lowercost storage, helping organizations meet availability requirements efficiently.

Enterprises need reliable migration and disaster recovery options when moving from on-premises environments to cloud regions of their choice. Flex Unified supports migration and external replication using the NetApp SnapMirror^® feature of ONTAP, enabling phased migrations with reduced cutover windows. Organizations can establish consistent disaster recovery and secondary protection strategies across regions without introducing new tools or processes.

If you couldn’t move your enterprise file or block workloads to Google Cloud because your favorite enterprise storage capability was missing in the cloud, look no further. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified service level covers all data management, performance, and cost efficiency for your enterprise workloads. We are looking forward to serving your workloads!

Explore more about Google Cloud NetApp Volumes

• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes documentation
• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes regional availability
• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes information page