Google has lunched Cloud Storage Nearline, a cloud service which, at first glance, seems too good to be true. The service promises to offer 100PB of free storage for six months. That’s 1000 TB, and a shocking 1,000,000 GBs.
But what is the target audience for such a big storage space? Who actually uses 100 petabytes? According to Google, besides the casual user who will probably never use up that much space, there are enough managers and directors out there looking for smart solutions for their businesses. Specifically, as smart as Google is offering.
The ad on front page of the service says that it is intended for disaster recovery, archiving, as well as plain backup. The service is meant to be extremely affordable also. Beyond the six free months available the instant you sign up for the service, the price will be $0.01 per gigabyte. That sounds more than reasonable for everyone.
I, to give the obvious example, have about 20 GBs spread around a few cloud services like Dropbox and OneDrive. I mainly have them like that because the cloud storages already available have certain limitations beyond which they require a monthly subscription that offers me much more space than I actually need, for a not that small amount of money. But for Google, I would have to pay just 20 cents.
If I need more space, I will pay more money, but not too much. Simple and ingenious, if I may say so.
This move by Google is a very smart one, since the Cloud Storage Nearline can be used by both casual cloud consumers, such as you and me, or by business consumers. Say you want to store the whole database of your company in a cloud so that everyone involved in the enterprise can access it from any device at any time.
Google Inc. also promises that the cloud service will have an uptime of up to 99 percent. It will also feature I/O operations available on demand, scheduled deleting, as well as archiving which are included in a service called lifecycle management. This will also allow you to schedule data transfers migrate data from other cloud services.
For users to more readily start using their service, Google has implemented a feature which transfers all the data from your other cloud spaces onto your Nearline. This may just be thing needed to make it the most successful cloud storage to date. But there is one issue which has yet to be put to the test by the large problem, and that is security.
Image source: cio-today.com
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.