Google Refreshes Its Enterprise Cloud Storage Lineup

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the gold standard of enterprise data cloud storage. Practically every hybrid cloud storage appliance sports AWS support and it consistently ranks among the top infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, a category that relies heavily on cloud storage (plus networking and processing, of course) to deliver adaptive, hyperscale application experiences.

Microsoft, too, with its far-reaching cloud data center footprint and StorSimple hybrid cloud storage system line, has also made a name for itself in the realm of cloud storage among businesses. (Microsoft acquired StorSimple in 2012).

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Today, Google announced a “refresh” of its Cloud Storage platform, complete with new Storage Classes that will enable businesses to align their business and technical requirements with their budgetary constraints.

“We’re introducing new storage classes, data lifecycle management tools, improved availability and lower prices — all to make it easy for our customers to store their data with the right type of storage,” wrote Google product manager Kirill Tropin in a blog post. “Whether a business needs to store and stream multimedia to their users, store data for machine learning and analytics or restore a critical archive without waiting for hours or days, Cloud Storage now offers a broad range of storage options to meet those needs.”

The new Storage Classes include Coldline, an archival and disaster recovery tier that costs $0.007 per gigabyte (GB) per month to maintain and $0.05 per GB of data retrieved. The new Multi-Regional and Regional Google cloud tiers offer service-level agreements (SLAs) of 99.95-percent and 99.9-percent uptime, respectively.

The Multi-Regional Google Storage Class, with its geo-redundant data protection capabilities, is priced at 2.6 cents per GB per month while Regional costs 2 cents per GB. Finally, the Nearline tier, suitable for backups and other infrequently-accessed data, costs a penny per GB per month.

Next month, customers using Google’s APIs for Multi-Regional and Regional cloud storage can expect to spend less.

“Effective November 1st we’re also introducing new lower API operations pricing for both Multi-Regional and Regional storage classes. Class A operations will cost $0.005 per 1,000 operations (50-percent price reduction), and Class B will cost $0.004 per 10,000 operations (60-percent price reduction),” added Tropin.

Moreover, Google is doubling down on a critical aspect of cost-effectively managing enterprise data storage.

“We’re introducing the beta of new data lifecycle management capabilities to make it easier to manage data placement,” Tropin stated. “Any Google Cloud Storage bucket can now hold data in different storage classes, and the lifecycle policy feature can automatically transition objects in-place to the appropriate colder storage class based on the age of the objects.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.