Google Inc. has partnered with several other cloud service firms to provide enterprise organizations a more economical alternative to in-house storage systems.
The recently launched Google Cloud Storage Nearline allows businesses to store data in the cloud for as low as US$0.01 per gigabyte a month. That’s cheaper than the standard Google storage price of $0.026/GB/month and the rates offered by many cloud storage providers.
Google is pitching Nearline as a service for organizations that can’t afford to get rid of the growing volume of data they constantly accumulate because it is critical for analysis and gaining market intelligence, but at the same time find that keeping such huge volume of data in storage can be very expensive.
The service does not retrieve data as fast as Google’s standard service but it provides an alternative cloud storage to services that keep data offline.
Cloud Storage Nearline provides:
- Fast Performance: all the benefits of cold storage while making the data immediately available. Unlike its competitors, Nearline enables ~3 second response times for data retrieval and improves SLAs.
- Low-cost: capacity pricing is extremely low at 1c per GB for data at rest.
- Security: redundant storage at multiple physical locations protects data. OAuth and granular access controls form strong, configurable security.
- Integrated: fully integrated with other Google Cloud Storage services, providing a consistent method of access across the entire Google Cloud Storage service line.
- Simple: no need to adopt new programming models – data manipulation behavior remains the same across Google Cloud Storage services.
Google is partnering with Symantec, NetApp, Iron Mountain and Geminare.
Symantec’s NetBackup backup software will support Nearline in version 7.7. The SteelStore on-premises from NetApp will deduplicate, encrypt and compress data before streaming it to Nearline.
Google is working with Iron Mountain to design an on-ramp to the cloud that uses Iron Mountain’s security, logistics and data management capabilities.
Geminare’s disaster recovery-as-a-service solution will run on Nearline to enable organizations to use the cloud as a secondary data centre location.