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Google this week introduced a new data archiving option for enterprises as part of a broader refresh of its Cloud Storage Services.
The announcements, at Google’s NEXT user event in London this week, included new data life cycle management tools, price cuts and the addition of several new partners to the Google storage ecosystem.
Coldline, the name for the company’s new storage option, is aimed at businesses looking to archive rarely used data—or cold data—but still require quick, low-latency access to it when needed. Google is touting it as perfect for archiving years’ worth of big data or multimedia content.
The option is priced at $0.007 per gigabyte of data to store per month and an additional 5 cents per GB to retrieve. The company claims the pricing makes Coldline the most economic option available to companies for storing datasets that are accessed less than once a year.
Google is offering a Cloud Storage Transfer service and a Switch and Save promotion for companies interested in migrating their archived data to Coldline storage. Depending on the type of data that is migrated, enterprises can become eligible to store potentially up to 100 petabytes of data for free for several months, Google Product Manager Kirill Tropin said announcing the new offering on the Google Cloud Platform blog this week.
Along with Coldline, Google also announced changes to its existing storage options.
Enterprises signed up for the company’s Standard storage option within a regional location have been converted to a new Cloud Storage Regional service, which offers essentially the same storage features and capabilities but at a 23 percent lower price point.
Google has positioned the option as ideal for enterprises looking to maintain their compute and storage resources within the same region. Like all of Google’s storage services, the Regional option offers enterprises millisecond access times to stored data. The service is priced at 2 cents per GB of data and comes with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
In addition, Google has converted all customers using its existing Standard storage option across multiple regions to a new Multi-Regional storage class. Priced at 2.6 cents per GB of data, the multiregional option is the costliest of the cloud storage options that Google announced this week and is aimed at organizations looking for near continuous data availability across regions.
“Regional closely addresses similar use-cases in terms of features, but at a much lower cost,” a Google spokeswoman said.
“Multi-Regional is generally a new offering class for us. By allowing customers to host in two plus regions, it offers more flexibility for use-cases like disaster recovery than Standard previously did,” she said.
The fourth storage option that enterprises now have is Google Nearline and is meant as a storage option for infrequently accessed data such as long-tail content and data backups. The Nearline option starts at 1 cent per GB.
Google this week also announced a beta version of a data management capability that it said will make it easier for enterprises to use and manage different cloud storage options for different business needs. A life cycle policy feature supports automatic transition of data from one storage type to another based on the age of the data and the frequency with which it is accessed.
In addition to the storage refreshes, Google this week announced several new partners whose technologies it said have been integrated with Google Cloud Storage. Among them are Veritas, Fastly, Cloudberry Lab, Komprise and Stor Reduce.
The partners deliver a range of capabilities. Cludberry’s Backup technology for instance will let organizations do real-time or scheduled data backup, encryption and restoration in Google’s cloud storage environment. Similarly, Stor Reduce offers what it calls inline deduplication software for moving petabytes of data to Coldline.