Google Cloud Storage Nearline Now Available to All, Offers 100PB Free Storage

Released as a beta in March, Cloud Storage Nearline is aimed at data-heavy businesses that need fast retrieval of data.

To further entice switchers, Google is also now offering customers who move their data to Cloud Storage Nearline from a competing service 100 petabyte of Nearline credit. That’s less than the 99.95% for products like Compute Engine, for example, but that’s part of the cost savings (together with the higher latency) that allow Google to offer Nearline – which still runs on the same infrastructure as all of Google’s other cloud computing services – at less than half the price than its standard cloud storage service.

Many companies now use a tiered storage model where data is first stored in easy-to-access but more expensive storage before they eventually transfer that data to cheaper systems that are less accessible.

If switching from another cloud provider sounds like a pain in the posterior, Google’s got that covered too by allowing import over HTTP or HTTPS. But by ditching cold storage services for single services that can make all of an organization’s data accessible on-demand, companies will be able to conduct data analysis for market intelligence purposes. Nearline comes with a default provisioned data access speed of 4MB of read throughput per terabyte of stored data. Pricing for Nearline can be as low as one cent per gigabyte, and data can be retrieved in as little as three seconds, the company said. This was generally not the norm in cold storage services such as Amazon Glacier, where the access time could be in hours.

Google this week announced the general availability of Cloud Storage Nearline, a service designed to let enterprises store very large quantities of important but infrequently used data at substantially lower costs than traditional offline storage. The service boasts data retrieval times of about three seconds and is fully integrated with the rest of Google’s Cloud Storage services, according to the announcement. With Google Nearline, organizations can gain access to their archived data in an on demand fashion. Actifio, Pixit Media, Unitrends, CloudBerry Lab and Filepicker will join Veritas/Symantec, NetApp, Iron Mountain and Geminare in providing a wider range of services to customers.