The company also said it would offer new customers a “Switch and Save” program, providing 100 petabytes of storage free for six months to companies that migrate their documents over from existing cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services' Glacier storage system.

Massive Storage, Rapid Access

“The goal of Google Cloud Storage Nearline is to provide organizations with a simple, low-cost, fast-response storage service with quick data backup, retrieval and access,” Avtandil Garakanidze, product manager for the Google Cloud Platform, said on the company’s blog.

Many companies currently 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. 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.

Google said that Nearline eliminates the concept of cold storage, which provides cheap online storage en masse but can't be accessed quickly. Nearline, in contrast, can be accessed at any time in a matter of seconds. 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.

New Partners

To further entice new users, Google said it will guarantee 99 percent uptime, on-demand I/O, and lifecycle management, in addition to a broadly expanded partner ecosystem. The on-demand I/O, which allows customers to retrieve data from a Nearline bucket faster than the provisioned 4 MB per second per terabyte, will be offered free to all customers for the first three months.

Google also announced that it would make its Cloud Storage Transfer Service generally available to all organizations so they can import large amounts of online data from HTTP/HTTPS locations, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, into Google Cloud Storage. The service would also allow enterprises to schedule recurring data transfers, perform lifecycle management, automate data archiving to Nearline, and schedule regular data deletions.

In addition to Amazon’s Glacier storage service, Nearline will also likely compete with Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery Service, which became widely available last week. Although not a cloud storage system per se, Azure does provide disaster recovery services.

Google also announced several new partners for Cloud Storage Nearline, including data virtualization platform Actifio, Pixit Media, data backup company Unitrends, CloudBerry Backup, and Filepicker. They join existing Nearline partners Veritas/Symantec, NetApp, Iron Mountain, and Geminare.

Tell Us What You Think

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Sarah:

Posted: 2015-07-28 @ 7:05am PT

One of these major competitors that should be mentioned is Zoolz, as they have removed many boundaries by using Amazon Glacier and eliminating all extra costs and being cheaper than any cloud service out there. They will be attending AWS reInvent for the second time this year, looking forward to it!