Google Nearline Delivers Some Serious Competition To Amazon Glacier

SpzToid writes Google is offering a new kind of data storage service – and revealing its cloud computing strategy against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company said on Wednesday that it would offer a service called Nearline, for non-essential data. Like an AWS product called Glacier, this storage costs just a penny a month per gigabyte. Microsoft's cheapest listed online storage is about 2.4 cents a gigabyte. While Glacier storage has a retrieval time of several hours, Google said Nearline data will be available in about three seconds. From the announcement: "Today, we're excited to introduce Google Cloud Storage Nearline, a simple, low-cost, fast-response storage service with quick data backup, retrieval and access. Many of you operate a tiered data storage and archival process, in which data moves from expensive online storage to offline cold storage. We know the value of having access to all of your data on demand, so Nearline enables you to easily backup and store limitless amounts of data at a very low cost and access it at any time in a matter of seconds."

Comments

Re:TFS just has marketing

[Kadin2048]

Yeah I'd like some more meat to the story as well. Amazon Glacier achieves its pricing by using low-RPM consumer drives plugged into some sort of high-density backplanes; supposedly they are so densely packed that you can only spin up a few drives at once due to power and heat issues. Hence the delay.

I assume Google is doing something similar, maybe with somewhat better power or cooling since they're offering faster retrieval times which implies that perhaps they can spin up a higher percentage of drives at a time.

I don't get the pricing?

[Pausanias]

A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?

Re:I don't get the pricing?

[wh1pp3t]

A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?

Why pay for a terabyte of storage when you are not using it to capacity?

Re:I don't get the pricing?

[stephanruby]

A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?

Here is an answer from someone on Quora.

Dropbox offers no Service Level Agreement. Actually they specifically provide no warrantees whatsoever about their service (http://www.dropbox.com/terms). This is a non-starter for many CIOs.

Beyond that, the fact that Dropbox doesn't "own" the underlying cloud storage architecture -- Amazon S3 -- could be an issue, although they advertise it as secure via in-transit and on-disk encryption (https://www.dropbox.com/help/27).

If it still is the case that Dropbox uses S3 itself, then that wouldn't make business sense for them to pay more for storage than they're charging their own customers (even if they've decided not to offer a Service Level Agreement).

So my guess is that this has to do with the way they count the storage for customers. Assuming that their customers do not encrypt their data before they place it on DropBox (which would make sense because DropBox customers are rarely CIOs themselves), then DropBox is most likely hashing the content and only storing a single copy of a file even if there are thousand virtual instances of that same file throughout their system.

Also note that in the special case where a company is footing the bill and DropBox can't count the same file multiple times within that same company, otherwise the customer company would complain, then DropBox actually advertises a rate of $15 per 5 terabytes per month per user (with no Service Level Agreement of any kind even for business users).

Re:TFS just has marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, there's never been any studies or hard data backing up the myth that HDDs spinning up/down have reliability concerns - this all came about as it's a S.M.A.R.T. metric (which also, is an estimate, and they also fail to provide citations or proof of it's validity).

It's very possible they simply are letting the HDDs idle and spinning them up as needed, I would expect Google of all people to have some pretty decent metrics on HDD failure rates/reasons.

They've been researching this stuff for over half a decade now: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/archive/disk_failures.pdf

Re:TFS just has marketing

[snowgirl]

https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/

It's common knowledge that Google has already been using consumer-grade drives for all of their servers. Because if a drive fails, "so what, we have another one over there holding the data..."

This is pretty much similar to what happened with GMail. They came out and said, "here, have a gigabyte for free!" and everyone was like, "yeah, right..."

Google has storage leaking out of its ears, and generates massive amounts of new data every day... sticking other people's data into the pile wouldn't even be a straw that breaks the camel's back... The camel is already hauling a hojillion ton rock, a straw isn't going to do shit.

DISCLAIMER: I worked for Google, this does not in any way reflect Google's official word on this news.

Re:Seems expensive

[paulhar]

> Oh? Have you factored in the cost of ensuring that you always have an offsite and fully up to date copy, not to mention secondary and tertiary copies for transit time in case your primary datacenter/server happens to kick the bucket/get stolen/evaporate?

Assumption: They guarantee that your backups/archives are safe.
Reality: "You are responsible for properly configuring and using the Service Offerings and taking your own steps to maintain appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Content, " Notice the words "and backup". If they lose your data it's your problem, not theirs. http://aws.amazon.com/agreemen...

> It's easy to compare the cost of an offered service to what you can pick up seeming similar equipment for from Amazon or Newegg... the realities though are far more complex.

Not to those who are 'skilled in the art'. For example. a copy of CrashPlan, two 3TB drives locally, one 3TB drive at a parent/friends house. For the paranoid, two 3TB drives at two peoples houses. Assumption: network bandwidth is sufficient and/or not much data change rate and/or happy to shuttle drives backward and forward.

Or, if you don't want to use crashplan, use rsync or other such replication technique. Set up md5sum scanning to run every few weeks at each location, takes a day or so to run and you're 100% certain that bitrot hasn't set in.

Advantages:
* I can touch each physical box.
* It's massively cheaper.
* Recovery is much quicker since I can just grab the physical copy.
* I know how the backup infrastructure is designed. If something goes wrong it's my fault, I can't rail uselessly against the sky gods if suddenly all my data goes away.

Disadvantages:
* You have to maintain it. You can't trust the sky gods to maintain it for you - a drive fails, you have to buy&replace. Forget to configure something/validate something is done correctly then it's your own fault.