Google goes for Amazon: Slash-fest on cloud storage prices
Builds EU data centres, drops IaaS costs - there will be blood
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
The Google juggernaut has ground out new cloud storage and compute facilities, slashed its prices, and provided European data centre support for its EU zone.
The Google cloud platform includes a range of products, such as its AppEngine, BigQuery, Compute Engine infrastructure service, as well as Cloud Storage. Google's product manager for its Cloud Platform, Jessie Jiang, announced the news in a blog post.
Here's the skinny:
- Cloud Storage prices are being cut more than 20 per cent, with prices being $0.095/GB/month for the first TB, $0.085/GB/month for the next 9TB, $0.075/GB/month for the next 90TB and $0.07/GB/month for the next 400TB.
- A limited preview of Durable Reduced Storage (DRS) is available. It loses some data redundancy, meaning lower availability, compared to bog-standard Google cloud, but has the same latency of access and durability. It's meant as a short term-ish backup facility for things like reschedulable batch compute jobs or data where fast restores are needed.
- The prices for this have the same capacity cut-off points as standard cloud storage, are billed on the same GB/month basis, and are $0.07, $0.06, $0.055 and $0.05.
- "Object Versioning" is being introduced, which keeps old versions of users' data and adds to the data protection capabilities. Object Versioning, which works at the bucket level, is only supported by the XML API and, as it develops, backwards-incompatible changes may be made to it. Sounds like beta test code at best.
- Europe-based data centres can now be used for App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and, in the near future, Compute Engine. European customers of such Google cloud products should experience faster performance and have international redundancy if they wish.
- There are 36, yes 36, new types of compute instances as Google goes niche-filling with a vengeance. Examples are a high memory instance, a high CPU/lower memory instance, and a diskless configuration instance. Google hasn't said in public what the other 33 instances are.
- The seventh item is Persistent Disk Snapshotting, for instant backup creation. You can move this snapshot around Google's cloud data centres and start up VMs from it.
Anything missing? There's no response yet by Google to Amazon's ultimate cheapo Glacier archive data storage offering. Maybe Google isn't going to offer an equivalent service?
Get pricing info here. ®
COMMENTS
Battling Behemoths
In some respects, this is similar to what started to happen in the retail sector many years ago.
The bigger suprmarket chains started to look at how to cut prices and deliver more; scale is key, but also making sure that the technology is used to its maximum capability to deliver efficiencies. However, they also found that they could "persuade" suppliers to do similar things; upscale production, cut costs, deliver more for less.
Those that did well, bought out the smaller players or the ones that couldn't / didn't keep up. Remember names like Fine Fare, International, David Greig, Gateway, Ford & Lock, Victor Value, et al. In most cases, it was simply a quick way to expand, to get more customers and sell more to squeeze the supplier.
To begin with, the winner is the consumer; they get a great deal at a good price funded by squeezed margins. However, there always comes a point where the cuts are too deep and businesses are not making a profit. You can survive for a while, but as a business model, running without making a profit is insane.
It will be interesting to see how far this develops.
Re: EU location or not..
@Fred Flinstone not sure if you're trolling but:
- RIPA gets abused a lot more often than PATRIOT eg http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2009/11/local-councils-continue-to-abuse-ripa.html
- Your link confuses a Google consumer product (free) with a Google Enterprise product (paid for) - they are treated very differently
- Your duty to clients should be giving them correct and up-to-date information on the marketplace, not lazily repeating tired tabloid headlines
It is a step in the right direction. Love the costs, BUT... Without the possibility of adding your own encryption scheme for the data, or designating access security that does not involve Google and their staff being able to access it this falls short.
Accessing your info from anywhere is a great feature, but lets keep it in the family.
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