Google takes aim at AWS Glacier with production-ready Nearline

Google is gunning for Amazon Web Services with promotional offers and improved read performance for its production-ready Nearline cloud storage service.

Nearline has been in beta since March this year. It is aimed at organisations that have large amounts of data to back up and to retrieve, for scenarios such as disaster recovery and information archival.

Google has priced Nearline storage at the same price as AWS Glacier - one US cent per gigabyte and month - with early deletion and network egress charges on top.

But it hopes faster access performance - Glacier retrieval jobs take 3-5 hours - measured in minutes will attract customers with large amounts of data to store.

While the read throughput of Nearline is by default provisioned as four megabytes per second per terabyte stored, which scales linearly, it can be upped with the paid on-demand I/O option.

On-demand I/O throughput boost is free until October 25 as a promotional offer, after which Google will charge half a US cent per gigabyte of data over the 4MBs per TB provisioned read throughput. 

Source: Google

As an initial bait-and-switch tactic to draw in new customers, Google is offering on-demand I/O for free for the first three months after the launch.

To further lure new customers to Nearline away from AWS, Google has set up the save and switch program. This gives customers who switch from another cloud storage provider up to 100 petabytes of capacity in Nearline, but only for six months.

Customers also need to put at least one petabyte of data into Google Cloud Storage within three months of signing up for Nearline.