Google Launches Cloud Storage Nearline, A Low-Cost Storage Service For Cold Data

Google is launching a new cloud storage service today that has the potential to change how many companies, ranging from startups to enterprises, view online storage. With Google Cloud Storage Nearline, businesses can store the data they or their customers don’t frequently need to access (think backups, log files or older photos), for $0.01 per gigabyte at rest.

Cold storage isn’t a new concept. Unlike other cold storage services like Amazon’s Glacier, where it can take hours before your data is available again once it has been put on ice, Google promises to make your data in Nearline available again in about 3 seconds.

As Google director of product management for the Cloud Platform team Tom Kershaw told me earlier this week, he believes that the gap between the cost of online and offline storage has to decrease.

Online storage has always been relatively expensive, but if you run a large email service, for example, your customers expect to be able to search through all of their messages immediately. You can’t just put older messages into offline storage and then tell your users to come back in an hour once their batch job has finished.

Similarly, businesses may want (or need) to keep their log files around for as long as possible. But once they are moved offline, you can’t quickly analyze historical data anymore.

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