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Google refreshes its cloud storage, slashes prices to a new low

The tech giant revamps its cloud storage offerings, introducing a cold storage tier to challenge Amazon Glacier.
Written by Nick Heath, Contributor
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The new tiers in Google Cloud Storage.

Image: Google

Google has refreshed its cloud storage offerings, introducing new tiers at a lower price.

The Google Cloud Storage platform will now offer four types of storage: Multi-regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline.

Each offers availability and pricing aimed at different use cases, from streaming media to disaster recovery.

Coldline is a new Google Cloud Storage tier, aimed at data accessed less than once per year. It is the lowest-priced offering, at 0.7 cents per GB per month with a five cent per GB access fee, and designed for disaster recovery and long-term archival. Google says it offers fast data access for a cold-storage option, describing it as offering access in milliseconds, the same as the other tiers.

In terms of cold-storage pricing, the release of Coldline puts Google on a par with AWS, which already has Amazon Glacier at 0.7 cents per GB per month.

Google retains its Nearline storage tier, which it describes as suited to data accessed infrequently, for example, for backup or rarely-accessed documents. Access costs one cent per GB per month.

The Multi-Regional tier stores data in multiple regions worldwide, providing redundancy in case of a regional outage, as well as local caches of data to reduce latency when serving content to users spread across the globe.

Storage costs $0.026 per GB per month and the option is available in the US, EU, and Asia. All existing Standard storage buckets in a multi-regional location have been converted to the Multi-Regional storage tier.

Finally, Google Cloud Storage regional is designed for users who need storage to feed Google's cloud compute services, such as Google Compute Engine or Google Cloud Machine Learning, within a specific region. Google says it is suited to high-throughput workloads, such as data transcoding or big-data analytics.

Storage costs $0.02 per GB per month. All existing Standard storage buckets in a regional location have been converted to the Regional storage tier, a change which Google says equates to a 23 percent price reduction, effective from November 1.

API operations pricing will also be reduced from November 1 for Multi-Regional and Regional storage tiers, with class A operations costing $0.005 per 1,000 operations, a 50 percent reduction, and Class B costing $0.004 per 10,000 operations, a 60 percent reduction.

These new storage classes will be integrated with offerings from various Google Cloud Storage partners, including Fastly, Veritas, Cloudian, Cloudberry Lab, Komprise, StorReduce, Cohesity and Sureline.

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