Adding to the roster of infrastructure options on its public cloud, Google Inc. today introduced sole-tenant nodes, new instances that offer dedicated hardware for sensitive workloads.

The regular virtual machines on the company’s platform are multitenant, meaning they run on servers typically used by multiple different customers at once. Google’s new sole-tenant nodes, in contrast, allow companies to reserve hardware for their exclusive use.

Dedicated infrastructure is necessary for sensitive applications that have to meet certain compliance requirements. The financial industry’s PCI Data Security Standard, as an example, mandates that payment card details be kept on isolated infrastructure. Google’s single-tenant nodes should also appeal to companies that simply want more control over their cloud environments.

There are two ways to use the new hardware option. Companies can manually select the servers on which they wish to deploy their virtual machines, or they can simply have Google’s algorithms make the decision automatically.

Amazon Web Services Inc. offers the same choice for customers of its competing dedicated instance offering. Microsoft Corp., the third major player in the cloud market, provides single-tenant compute options as well.

Google has improved upon the concept by building a number of native management features into its new offering. According to the company, customers can tag virtual machines with special labels to control on what servers they run on. This mechanism lends itself to, among other things, isolating financial systems and other sensitive workloads from the other applications in a deployment.

The sole-tenant notes are available in beta. Google will charge customers based on the amount of processing power and system memory they use, with the addition of a 10 percent “sole-tenancy premium” on those resources.

Google’s move into dedicated cloud hardware comes just days after Microsoft introduced new instances for its rival Azure platform. The main highlight is a memory-optimized virtual machine with up to 12 terabytes of memory, which the company said is the most offered by any cloud provider.

Image: Google