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Google slings SSD persistent disks at huge 'n' hungry servers

Flash! Ah-ahhhh! Savior of the Google Cloud

Google has given admins a far faster medium to store data in when fiddling around with servers on its cloud.

The advertising company turned cloud-slinger announced on Monday that it is adding SSD persistent disks to its cloud, along with multi-data center load balancing.

By doing this, Google has given admins a way to dramatically speed up access rates to data in its cloud from both an infrastructure management and an end-user point of view.

Significantly, the SSD Persistent Disks help it compete with Amazon. Both Google and Amazon's persistent disks are capable of 30 read and write input-output operations per gigabyte.

"Persistent disks storage is network storage that can be attached to and from virtual machine instances and perform the same function as a physical hard drive attached to your computer," Google explains in an FAQ.

Google's disks cost $0.325 per month per gigabyte, versus $0.125 for Amazon's product. While Amazon charges $0.10 per provisioned IOPS-per month, however, Google doesn't charge.

"While other providers count each and every IOPS and charge extra for them, SSD persistent disk includes IOPS in the base price with no extra charges or fees, making cost completely predictable and easy to model," the company sniffed in a blog post.

Each disk is encrypted using AES-256 encryption, according to a Google FAQ. Admins would do well to remember that the speedy access properties of the disk come at a hefty price, with $1.00 per month buying them either a standard persistent disk with 25GB of space, 7.5 read IOPS, and 37.5 write IOPS, or a high-IOPS persistent disk with only 3GB of space and 90 read IOPS and 90 write IOPS.

HTTP load balancing, meanwhile – Google's other new feature – lets admins balance traffic across multiple servers in multiple data centers, all under a single external IP address. "This creates a truly global service offering and lets our customers optimize their compute resources and reduce latency on a global scale," Google wrote.

These upgrades come a week ahead of Google I/O, at which Google is expected to make multiple announcements that enhance the capabilities of its cloud, which competes with Amazon's Amazon Web Services tech as well as Microsoft's Azure cloud. ®

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