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Google announced on May 9, 2018, that it had agreed to acquire Velostrata, an Israel-based enterprise cloud-migration startup. Velostrata’s technology streamed virtual-machine disk data into Google Cloud while the destination VM was already running, helping organizations move workloads with less downtime than a full copy-before-start approach. Google did not disclose the purchase price.

Why did Google buy Velostrata?

Google said the acquisition would add to its portfolio of tools for enterprises moving workloads to the cloud. Velostrata addressed a practical obstacle in that work: migrating a virtual machine can take time if the entire disk must be copied before the workload can start at its destination.

Google described Velostrata as technology for adapting workloads to run in the cloud and decoupling compute from storage. That capability was intended for virtual-machine workloads such as large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps environments and large batch-processing jobs. Google’s May 9, 2018 announcement said the team would join Google’s Tel Aviv office.

What did Velostrata do?

Velostrata built a service for moving virtualized servers from an existing environment to Google Cloud. Rather than making the destination VM wait for every disk block to arrive, its approach let the cloud VM start while the remaining data transferred in the background.

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That separation of compute from storage was central to the product: a workload could begin running in the destination cloud before the full disk had been copied. This was a migration method for virtual-machine workloads, not a claim that every application or migration could move without preparation or interruption.

How did Velostrata migrate virtual machines?

Google Cloud’s 2018 technical description says Velostrata used agentless streaming to transfer compressed, deduplicated and encrypted disk blocks. The replacement VM started in Google Cloud as the full virtualized-server contents were streamed transparently in the background.

  1. Start the destination VM. The replacement virtual machine could run in Google Cloud before the complete disk transfer finished.
  2. Stream the disk data. Velostrata sent disk blocks to the cloud using compression, deduplication and encryption.
  3. Keep transferring in the background. The VM could access the data it needed while the remaining contents continued to arrive.
  4. Test and manage the move. Google’s description covered testing and rollback as part of the workflow, allowing teams to validate a migration and return to the prior environment if needed.

Google Cloud documented approximately 5 to 10 minutes of downtime for the process in its 2018 technical post. That is Google’s stated figure for the documented migration process, not a guarantee for every workload, configuration or migration.

What happened to Velostrata after Google acquired it?

The acquisition was announced as an agreement subject to closing conditions, rather than as a completed deal on announcement day. A later Google Cloud update confirms that Velostrata’s technology and documentation had become part of the GCP family: on January 29, 2019, Google said Velostrata 4.0 documentation was officially part of Google Cloud.

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The 4.0 update added migration waves, Click to Deploy, EC2 right-sizing and Linux-license conversion features, according to Google’s January 29, 2019 update. The available announcement materials establish the integration into Google Cloud, but do not establish a current standalone Velostrata product or SKU.

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What is known about the deal?

Google did not publish the acquisition price. Fortune’s contemporaneous May 2018 report said Velostrata had 25 employees and had raised about $31.5 million; those figures came from secondary reporting, not Google’s announcement.

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