Google betas cold data cloud storage

Google has released a beta version of a cloud-based ‘cold’ storage platform that promises fast availability to infrequently accessed data.

Appropriate for storing data in situations where lower availability and higher latency is required, Nearline Storage is intended for use cases including cold data storage and disaster recovery.

Cold storage is particularly suitable for information such as financial and healthcare records, digital media archives, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.

Organisations relying on tape-based archiving of cold data are required to guess at future capacity, purchase their needs up front and store the data close by for future DR.

Cloud storage services, such as Nearline offer easily scalability and pay-as-you-go. 

Google has priced its offering to match the Amazon Glacier solution at US$0.01 per GB per month for data at rest, with a US$0.01 per gigabyte charge for data retrieval and access.

Customers will be charged a penalty for deleting data stored for less than a month. In terms of throughput, customers get 4MB/s for every TB they have stored on the platform.

Since Nearline shares APIs with other Google cloud storage services, enthusiasts can build a tiered storage approach with a combination of the company's standard storage for frequently accessed data, durable reduced availability storage for less critical workloads, linked backup and the new service for long-term archiving.  

Google has partnered with NetApp, Symantec, Iron Mountain and Geminaire to offer products that integrate with the new platform.

Nearline is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy while it is in beta stage.