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

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:Seems expensive

[DaHat]

but doing this yourself seems to be a lot cheaper.

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?

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.

and cannot put anything confidential there (unless you are not bothered by various TLAs searching through it).

There are ways to manage even that, see this brief bit of Wikipedia for a start.

I don't know if there are any other commercial or enterprise products out there that do it, but I know this one stores all of it's data in the cloud (with a local cache) but does all of the encryption on site. Only if you choose does the encryption key leave your site and then only in a way you choose making it rather problematic for a TLA or Microsoft to get to your data.

It is an interesting world when you are dealing with data you cannot legally delete for a period of time and simply want to rid yourself of the burden of having to store it locally. Suing Google or Amazon because their cold storage failed is a far better option than having your IT guy tell you that the HD they stored the crucial data to doesn't spin up anymore... and that the backup disk ended up in the secretary desktop.