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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."
It's the webframe, Captain! She kenna take any more data...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How do they do it?
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?
1 cent per month per GB is $40 for 4TB per month, or 1/5 of what an external 4TB USB3.0 disk costs. As this is "nonessential" data, backup is optional. Sure, the external disk somehow needs to be connected to your server, and there are other factors, but doing this yourself seems to be a lot cheaper.
Yes, I know if you do it yourself, there is cost for the person doing it as well, but you need to manage the cloud-storage also, and over a worse interface and you get less control in the cloud and cannot put anything confidential there (unless you are not bothered by various TLAs searching through it).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Overreacting much? You still have a choice on HOW you store your data in the cloud. I keep a backup of my personal data in Amazon S3, but I'm using Duplicity, which encrypts my data with GPG.
And solved for 30 years? Really? I don't recall having a backup service like this 30 years ago with such uptime, and certainly not in my own home.
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
Me either. I have ~250 gigabytes of pictures to back up, and I wanted to do it offsite (they're our family memories). Before Glacier came along, I was looking at building NAS machines for my brother and I that we would host each other's backup data. It would've worked, but what a PITA, and a lot of up-front expense. Glacier is easy, and cheap - my AWS bill last month was $2.50. For that kind of money, it's hard to justify the time and expense of rolling my own remote NAS solution. (I know over the long run I might be able to build the remote NAS solution for less money, but figure in electricity costs and potential drive replacements, and I'm not sure that solution would be that much cheaper. It would all depend on how long the drives last.)
Is there already some personal backup software for GNU/Linux that encrypts all data and can use this as storage?
I'm looking for large offline storage but strong client-side encryption is a must.
Google is a tech giant... and there is no stopping it. No wonder it will overtake everything in its way at this rate.
Actually, not that simple. Neither have egress costs if you use their VMs - it's only going to the internet. Amazon Glacier to Internet is free for the first 1GB, $.09/gb for the first 10tb, $.085/gb until 50tb (at between 10-50tb Nearline is cheaper), then $.07 until 150tb.
Both charge 1 cent/gb for reads, though AWS is free for the first 5%.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Good analysis here, Shanghai.
In terms of the prediction of "$360/TB off a $30/TB investment", does that take into account redundancy to protect their liability for drive failure? I'm thinking they have at least two copies of everything a customer uploads. Maybe three. It's still great money, but I think the numbers are more like $360/TB off a $60/TB investment.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I thought that our tape backup system is luxury, for such a small company. Quite the contrary, it seems that tape is very cheap. Back of the envelope calculation: Our daily full backup is about 600 gigabytes. We are using 6 pieces of LTO-3 tapes for the last days and 1 for each month, plus 1 for each year. That is about 23 tapes in use. Total of 23Ã--600GB is 13800GB, 138 dollar each month on Google Nearline, which is 1700$ per year. The total cost of the tape drive, the tapes and the SCSI adapter was less than 1700$. And I expect that to work for at least 5 years, not 1. That means that for backup tape is 80% cheaper. Of course deduplication would reduce the data amount to a few percentage of its current size. But then we would lose the plenty of redundancy we have with tapes. Google Nearline is offsite, that is good, or actually, that is required for backup. Offline copies are required too, and that is where the entire thing fails for this purpose. Google nearline is online storage from a backup point of view. In other words it cannot be used for backup. It can be part of a backup strategy, though. It could be good for saving backup copies of family photos, if the account password is managed very cautiously. Otherwise I do not see the use cases for this service, but I am sure there are some.