Google Cuts Prices On Enterprise Cloud Services

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Google has made sizable price cuts across its storage, compute and BigQuery analysis services (e.g., Google BigQuery on-demand prices have been reduced by up to 85%). Google has also introduced a number of new services, including managed virtual machines, an extension of BigQuery for live data and the ability to run copies of the enterprise-ready Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux and Windows Server 2008 R2. Collectively, these announcements show that Google may be coming to understand that 'they really need to step it up' in the market for cloud computing services, said John Rymer, Forrester Research's principal analyst covering application development and delivery."

Comments

including NSA "discount"

[OffTheLip]

What a deal!

Re:including NSA "discount"

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoooosh*

he meant the free NSA auditing service "for your protection citizensubject. at no extra cost

Google Cloud is Way Too Limited

[Rob Riggs]

Google has a *long* way to go. Unless they allow their customers to select the operating system (by providing IaaS), this just won't fly long term. We looked at using Google, but we need Windows Server 2012 for some of the things we wanted to move out of our datacenters. And SQL Server. They provide/allow neither.

Re:Google Cloud is Way Too Limited

[Shados]

Not any more. Providing Windows server 2012 was also part of the announcement. SQL server I'm sure you can install yourself.

Maybe Im blind, but i only see 2008 in the announcement, not 2012.

The Big Data Crash

[broward]

The Big Data Crash began about a year ago. Google jiggered the numbers from its own Trends tool sometime earlier this year to disguise it, but you can still still it happening on Indeed.com/jobtrends page. Most likely, they're cutting prices in the face of declining rate-of-increase in demand. i wrote this article about it six months ago -

http://nodemy.jit.su/post/TheB...

Re:The Big Data Crash

[ducomputergeek]

I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.

And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

Re:The Big Data Crash

[mlts]

The problem is that there is craploads of bandwidth available on the LAN... but here in the US, WAN connections are relatively slow and pricy.

A good example of this is the few terabytes of space I have on Google Drive. If I want to kick a terabyte of data across a cable link, there is a good chance that I'd be handed a $250 bill for the bandwidth used. If I tried moving a TB over LTE... that will be a five digit bill on every single cellular provider in the US. So, the cloud storage is nice... but storing it becomes expensive, as the $250 to kick a TB over could buy two hard disks that the data gets copied on and then stored separate places... and access to data via a USB port is free (for now...)

So, cloud technology sounds great... but having a grand warehouse is one thing... but if the roads are all one lane tollways that take 2-3 days to get out of a city to store stuff there, it is pointless.

The future of storage really can't be the cloud, other than using the cloud as a piece of media that has a high cost for access, high reliability, low security (you encrypt data before it goes out), and high accessibility.

Re:The Big Data Crash

[swb]

But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

You don't have a bank account? Credit cards? No entry in the credit reporting agency databases?

Oh, OK, I get it -- you don't manually store financial data in consumer cloud services on your own, but you still have your financial data in cloud(s) somewhere, it's just not under your control.

Re:The Big Data Crash

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting graphs you got from google trends six months ago. Sharp declines that look like they are going over a cliff. Have you checked the data recently to see where that cliff has headed since? I'll give you a hint: up. Up to its highest level of all time. More people are interested in big data than ever before. Could it be that their infrastructure is improving and getting cheaper and therefore they can charge less... Like almost every technology for the last 50 years? But yeah... it could be doom and gloom (and self selective framed graphs).

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=big%20data

Re:The Big Data Crash

[alen]

most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space
for larger organizations with terabytes or hundreds of TB of data it doesn't make any sense to dump their data into this cloud thing

Re:The Big Data Crash

[Bengie]

There's plenty of market where they need something like an SQL server, which is low bandwidth, but the customer doesn't have the funds for a $10k server and $90k/year admin to run it, so they opt for $100/month from a cloud service.

Re:The Big Data Crash

[Slashdot Parent]

most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space

It kinda sorta depends.

My current client is a large enough organization to operate its own datacenters in multiple geographic locations. All of their ordinary computational and storage needs are met by company-owned and operated infrastructure. That being said, if I were to email the storage team and the Unix team and say, "Hey, I'm going to need 1000 nodes and 500TB of network attached storage for a Hadoop cluster to do some analysis. I estimate that the analysis will take roughly one week to complete, so I'll only need those resources for 2 weeks," they would not be able to satisfy that request. However, if I called up our Amazon Web Services contact and said the same thing, he'd respond with a price quote.

Also, even though we have multiple datacenters, we still use Amazon CloudFront. Just because we have multiple datacenters doesn't mean that we operate them all over the world.

So even decent-sized organizations can have a use for "that thar cloud thingydingy".

Re:The Big Data Crash

[Anonymous Coward]

the GP was referring to something else. the value you get from tapping big data for your decision making. E.g. why would say walmart analyze their sales data? So they start analyzing sales trends, and gain a HUGE benefit from smarter decision making... Then they try to repeat that, and again, they realize a huge monetary gain. Then they do it again, and the gain is smaller this time... and no matter what they try to do with that sales data, they can't get more value squeezed out of that big data analytic that they're doing.

Beyond a certain point, someone realizes it makes no sense to pour ridiculous amounts of money at solutions that at best only provide a marginal value increase.

It's the same with advertising. You dedicate 20% of your revenue to advertising, you make more revenue. You dedicate 40% of revenue to advertising, and you generate even more revenue. But once your consumer base is saturated, and you've used all the advertising tricks, spending additional moneh on advertising isn't going to increase your revenue.

That's why you don't see many household items you use every day advertised every single day on TV...

Re:Acourding to the article, Verizon style pricing

[ArcadeMan]

Cloud Storage is now priced at US$0.026 cents per GB per month, and $0.020 cents per GB per month.

It's "U.S. dollar 0.026 cents" and "U.S. dollar 0.020 cents", what's unclear about that? It's clearly not a typo since they wrote it that way, twice.

IPv6 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do their VMs support IPv6 yet, or are they still stuck in IPv4 land only? I was quite shocked to find a product launched in this decade didn't have IPv6 connectivity out of the box.

Windows Server 2008 R2? really?

[Daltorak]

Windows Server 2008 R2 came out almost FIVE YEARS AGO and only now are they introducing experimental support for it??
Mainstream support for 2008 R2 ends in less than a year!

Re:Acourding to the article, Verizon style pricing

[dave420]

Because there are two units for one number, which doesn't make any sense if you actually look at the numbers. US$0.026 or 2.6 cents US would make more sense.

Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really?

[Virtucon]

Yeah, sad really. But mainstream support ends next year (Jan 1, 2015) but extended goes on till 2020. Meaning licenses from MSFT - tough to get and support for new product releases may not support 2008 but patches etc. keep on going.

2003 however dies as far as all support offerings in July 2015...

Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really?

[swb]

It's not hard to see Google being reluctant/unwilling to do anything to encourage the use of Microsoft products. Google's economy of scale on hosting is probably greatly reduced when having to support a Microsoft OS as well.

Re:Acourding to the article, Verizon style pricing

[ArcadeMan]

That's exactly what I was saying. There's two units, it makes no sense and they even made the mistake twice. I also never understood why the currency is written before the amount, you don't say "miles 500" or "pounds 50". You also don't say "U.S. dollars 5.25" when speaking out loud either.

Beware!

[fustakrakich]

You never know when Google is going to pull the plug. You have been warned.

Re:Beware!

[CodeReign]

I do believe there is an SLA however they only give 2 months for API changes, kinda shit.

maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that news regarding big data mining by eg. the NSA and governments is coming to public knowledge.

Re:Acourding to the article, Verizon style pricing

[ArcadeMan]

500 miles vs miles 500
50 pounds vs pounds 50
5.25$USD vs USD$5.25

Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really?

[jp10558]

Now that I did not know. Silly me, I thought they would keep mainstream support for Server 2008 R2 through Windows 7 lifetime.

This is why I try and do everything possible on RHEL derivatives, 10 yr support cycle so I'm upgrading when I have time and features I want, not because security updates are stopping.

Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really?

[Virtucon]

Well on 2008 R2 you're getting just over 10 years but MSFT picks some pretty weird dates for retirement. January 14, 2020 for example. I'm not saying I agree with it but it seems that they've been a bit more aggressive when it comes to retiring things after all the FUD around XP's retirement date. Windows 7 BTW has the same retirement dates for mainstream and extended end of life as 2008 R2 so no worries there I guess so they don't want to have a repeat it would seem for XP.