Google is offering a new kind of data storage service which should go a long way to melting Amazon’s Glacier.
Nearline is for non-essential data, similar to Glacier, but it is offering it a cent a month per gigabyte. This is more than half the cheapest in the market place, which is Microsoft’s 2.4 cents a gigabyte.
Glacier storage has a retrieval time of several hours, and Nearline data will be available in about three seconds.
While three seconds is years for something like serving a web page, it is ideal for data analysis as well as long-term storage.
This could be Google’s cunning plan – positioning itself as the cloud computing company for all kinds of data analysis.
Tom Kershaw, director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform said that it is not about storage stupid. Its about what you do with analytics. Set ups like Nearline will mean you never have to delete anything and you can always use data.
Google announced plans with several storage providers, including Veritas/Symantec and NetApp, to encrypt and transport data from their systems onto Nearline.
On the consumer front, Dropbox charges about $10 a month to store a terabyte of data, which is the same price as Nearline and Glacier. However those businesses count on most of their customers storing well below their limit.
Either way it is looking like things are hotting up on the cloud with costs being driven down. Scattered showers much be expected.
