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Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly

How low can all these Clouds go? Pretty low

Google has slashed its online Drive storage prices so fast, it undercuts all of its rivals – and its own products. The Reg suspects the web king will dramatically lower its infrastructure-as-a-service storage prices as well in two weeks.

The dramatic price cut for Google Drive was announced on Thursday: storing 100GB of data in its systems per month has fallen from $4.99 to $1.99. Storing a terabyte now costs $9.99 a month versus $49.99 previously, and 10TB will set you back $99.99 per month.

As a result of today's news, we're expecting reprisals from rivals Dropbox ($9.99 for 100GB per user, per month) and Box ($5 per user per month for 100GB and additional features. (You can still pick up a decent 1TB drive for about 60 dollars, working out to the low price of $5 a month over a year versus Google's $9.99.)

What may get IT admins rubbing their hands with glee is that this Drive price cut also falls far below the prices charged by typical infrastructure-as-a-service providers for barebones storage. Amazon Web Services's S3 service costs $8.50 per 100GB per month, and Microsoft's Windows Azure charges $6.80 for 100GB of locally redundant stored data a month.

More intriguingly, the Drive price cut undercuts the $6.30 Google charges for storing 100GB in its mainstream infrastructure-as-a-service Google Cloud Storage.

It's rare for a company to undercut itself so dramatically, and there's a good indication Google is about to dramatically lower the price of its mainstream infrastructure pricing.

For one thing, the search supremo is due to hold a major cloud event in San Francisco on March 25 where it promises to announce "a number of new products and services."

Some of these will help developers deal with "big data" on the Google Cloud Platform. Though that marketing term means a lot of things to a lot of people, we can all agree that it fundamentally relates to software atop large amounts of stored information.

Meanwhile, El Reg spoke to a Silicon Valley business today that revealed it had been working with Google on qualifying its technology on "a big upgrade to [Google's] storage engine."

Given the price cut, the timing of the San Francisco event, and this titbit of gossip, El Reg's cloud desk is confident to bet that Google will announce a significant gut-wrenching price reduction to its main cloud storage services within the coming month.

When it does, Amazon and Microsoft will be compelled to do something in response. Whatever your feelings on storing data on public off-site clouds, it's nice that for once vendors are beating each other up to offer the lowest prices, rather than steadily increasing them as with the typical on-premises world. ®

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