Google Turns Up Heat on AWS with Nearline Storage

Yesterday Google announced its new archival storage product, Nearline.  Nearline is one of three classes of object storage on the Google platform which also include Standard and Durable Reduced Availability (DRA).  Nearline is comparable to AWS Glacier in that it is designed for data that is not frequently accessed and is priced at $.01 per gigabyte per month (same as Glacier).  Both services charge an additional access fee every time you retrieve your archived data.  The big advantage that Nearline seems to have over Glacier is the access time of <3 seconds to the first byte where as Glacier may take hours to retrieve and deliver your data.  Both services promise high reliability and durability but only AWS will say 99.999999999% durability.  Google does not specify the exact likelihood of data being preserved on Nearline as of this writing.  It will be interesting to see how AWS responds to this competitive challenge since data storage is usually the gateway drug to cloud, but Google is definitely making a play to get new clients in the door.   You can find the details of Nearline in the documentation located here

Blue Sentry is an advanced-tier Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting partner specializing in application and data migrations, expert managed services and virtual desktops. Blue Sentry serves clients globally, with operations in North Carolina and South Carolina.