Google lays second transatlantic cable to increase cloud reliability

Google announced on Tuesday that it has started laying a new transatlantic cable that will speed up data flow between the United States and Europe and make its cloud network more reliable by allowing better rerouting of traffic in the event of an outage.

The Grace Hopper cable, which implements state-of-the-art fiber switching architecture, will power several Google Cloud services, including Google Cloud Platform, Gmail and Meet, wrote Bikash Koley, vice president of Google Global Network, in a blog post. ‘business.

The cable leaves New York and splits in the waters off northern Europe, with one leg ending in Bude, UK, and the other in Bilboa, Spain.

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The Mountain View, California, UK-based Internet giant’s first private connection, and the first route to Spain, will provide “greater resiliency to the network that underpins consumer and consumer products.” Google business, ”Koley said.

Google owns and operates three other submarine cables “to connect distant continents along the ocean floor” —Curie, connecting the United States and Central and South America; Dunant, which crosses the Atlantic towards France, and Equiano, between Portugal and two landing sites in Africa. “Private submarine cables allow us to effectively plan for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world, and to add a layer of security beyond what is available on the public Internet,” said Koley said.

Grace Hopper’s landing in Spain will help integrate a Google Cloud region that is expected to open in Madrid into the provider’s global network, he said.

The cable will contain 16 pairs of fibers, which Google says is a significant upgrade to the current infrastructure connecting the Internet between the United States and Europe. Its new optical switching infrastructure will improve reliability, Koley said, by providing an alternate data route during outages.

“Grace Hopper is the first submarine cable in the world to use this technology, and we look forward to deploying it on other systems in the future,” he said.

Google signed a contract earlier this year with SubCom to build the cable, which the company hopes will be completed by 2022.

“These fiber strands that connect us all to the ocean floor are essential in how we define a planetary cloud,” said Scott Jensen, director of customer partners at SADA Systems, a Google Cloud partner based in Los Angeles.

Google’s global network is one of its cloud’s most critical differentiators, Jensen said, not only for speeding up data connections, but also for enabling massive scalability and resilient compute from anywhere.

With the Grace Hopper Cable, “SADA’s ability to serve our Google Cloud customers is enhanced not only for customers with a global presence, but even for domestic companies who enjoy the inherent advantage of global system reliability.” did he declare.

The submarine cable will provide several benefits to Google Cloud partners, said Alex Zadorozhnyi, technical director of cloud and transformation at Pythian, a Google partner based in Toronto.

Fully owned cables improve the reliability of the platform by including proprietary protocols for failover, he said.

“The capacity and density of data transferred over a cable owned exclusively by a cable will become a common operation for engineers supporting Google Cloud,” Zadorozhnyi told CRN.

With the new cable, Google will be able to deliver low latency networks to more of its customers, not just merchants and financial institutions. And by fully owning the connective infrastructure between GCP regions, the large-scale cloud provider can introduce better hybrid cloud capabilities, innovate on new data transfer features, and extend the level of service coverage to end users of the whole world.

Google will also be able to launch new regions in areas that have struggled to achieve reliable connectivity with the rest of its infrastructure, he said.

“Google has proven to have better numbers of reliability, delivered features, and control when relying on owned-only infrastructure, and as such, Google exhibits higher levels of trust among customers and greater trust from partners to continue to innovate rapidly and help generate new and established businesses to join Google Cloud, ”Zadorozhnyi told CRN.

Cable is the namesake of Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on compilers contributed to the development of the COBOL programming language.