Google is known to push the envelope in almost every market it enters. The not-so-old saying “go big or go home” certainly applies to almost everything Google does, and it often leaves established companies scrambling to catch up when it enters a new market or launches a new product in a market it has already addressed.
The latter is the case with Google’s latest offering, and it stands to shake up the cloud storage market with its new Nearline service.
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Google took the wraps off of its new cloud storage solution “Nearline” this week, and it really could be a game-changer. The new offering is a cold storage solution for businesses, but it is unlike any popular service that came before it.
For those unaware, cold storage is a means of storing data that isn’t frequently accessed. When the data is not being used, it is far less expensive to store, so the solution is perfect for things like backups and historical data.
Such is the case with Nearline, which charges just $0.01 per gigabyte to store data that is dormant.
The key differentiator with Nearline is what happens once you actually need that data again. While comparable services from the likes of Amazon can take hours to make cold-stored data accessible again, Google’s new service takes just 3 seconds.
Here are some bullet points from Google’s blog post on Nearline:
- Fast Performance: all the benefits of cold storage while making the data immediately available. Unlike its competitors, Nearline enables ~3 second response times for data retrieval and improves SLAs.
- Low-cost: capacity pricing is extremely low at 1c per GB for data at rest.
- Security: redundant storage at multiple physical locations protects data. OAuth and granular access controls form strong, configurable security.
- Integrated: fully integrated with other Google Cloud Storage services, providing a consistent method of access across the entire Google Cloud Storage service line.
- Simple: no need to adopt new programming models – data manipulation behavior remains the same across Google Cloud Storage services.
Google Nearline is available immediately, but it does carry a beta label.
