Google's Cloud Storage Nearline is now available to the general public. The company has announced that the service, which offers low-cost premium archiving and backing up of data, has moved out of beta. In order to entice users, Google is offering storage of 100PB of space for free.
Released as a beta in March, Cloud Storage Nearline is aimed at data-heavy businesses that need fast retrieval of data. The service competes with Dropbox, Amazon's Glacier, Box, and OneDrive among others. Unlike its competitors that take hours for handling such voluminous data, Google says that Nearline could do it in seconds and minutes.
Discussing Nearline's other features,
Google promises 99 percent uptime, on demand I/O operations, and lifecycle management - consisting of features such as automated archival and scheduled deletions. And, of course, there is the 100PB free of storage for up to six months. Afterwards, users will have to pay $0.01 per GB every month.
"You now will be able to configure one-time data migrations, as well as schedule recurring data transfers,"
explained Avtandil Garakanidze, Google product manager, on a company blog post.
The company is also offering its on-demand I/O feature, which allows users to increase I/O rate from typical read of 4MB per second, for free for the first three months.
To help users jump the boat, Nearline's Cloud Storage Transfer feature allows one to import large amount of data from HTTP/HTTPS services such as Amazon S3. Speaking of Amazon, Google is also offering a total cost of ownership calculator to let users know how much they will be saving by switching from Amazon Web Services.