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Google Cuts Prices On Enterprise Cloud Services

Posted by Unknown on from the first-one-to-zero-...-wins dept.

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."

10 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. including NSA "discount" by OffTheLip · · Score: 4, Funny

    What a deal!

  2. The Big Data Crash by broward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:The Big Data Crash by mlts · · Score: 2

      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.

    2. Re:The Big Data Crash by swb · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:The Big Data Crash by Slashdot+Parent · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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".

      --
      They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
  3. Re:Google Cloud is Way Too Limited by Shados · · Score: 2

    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.

  4. IPv6 support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. Windows Server 2008 R2? really? by Daltorak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  6. Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really? by Virtucon · · Score: 2

    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...

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  7. Re:Windows Server 2008 R2? really? by swb · · Score: 2

    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.