Google have moved quickly and chopped the rates for its Cloud Storage software product, which lets developers store great chunks of data on the search engine company’s servers.
The price cut comes one day after Amazon Web Service slashed its cloud infrastructure prices for the 19th time.
Cloud Storage uses the RESTful application programming interface (API) and Google’s storage and networking infrastructure to store data and code from cloud computing projects while they are being built. The service provides storage for computation, static content hosting, Web applications, as well as the classic backup and recovery scenarios.
Enterprise storage providers have also integrated Google Cloud Storage to provide a Web-based alternative to their existing services. For example, Panzura allows global businesses to store, collaborate and backup files in the cloud using its Panzura File System and Cloud Storage.
Cloud Storage pricing is based on storage and bandwidth usage, which are are calculated in gigabytes (GB).
By and large, Google has shaved off pennies per GB. The new pricing, effective retroactively from March 1, 2012, starts at $0.12 (£0.07) up to a terabyte (TB), down from $0.13 (£0.08) up to a TB. The next 9TB now costs developers $0.105 (£0.06) per GB, down from $0.12 (£0.07) per GB.
Google will continue to offer its Cloud Storage free trial quota through 30 June, 2012. Users of this offer will get up to 5GB of storage and can access 25GB of download data free for their first project that uses Cloud Storage.
Google first introduced Cloud Storage at Google I/O in May 2010, providing an alternative to Amazon’s popular Simple Storage Service (S3).
Even so, AWS provided some anecdotal evidence of cost-savings one of its customers has seen with the new pricing scheme. This unnamed customer was running 360,000 hours worth of Amazon EC2 instances.
“Without this customer changing a thing, with our new EC2 pricing, their bill will drop by over $25,000 (£15,916) next month, or $300,000 (£190.997) per year – an 8.6 percent savings in their On-Demand spend,”wrote Jeff Barr, senior manager of Web services evangelism at Amazon.com, in a blog post.
That’s the type of savings that C-level executives drool over. It isn’t clear how much Google’s Cloud Storage price cuts will save its customers, but it’s a sign that the company is committed to competing with AWS, which kick-started the platform-as-a-service (PAAS) last decade.
Google is also reportedly preparing to launch Google Drive, a lighter weight storage locker geared to help consumers and businesses storage documents, photos and files.
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There is no doubt Amazon, Google and Microsoft are very good at marketing. Their prices are not low at all. However, many people just blindly believe so. Most people don't realize that they charge for storage space, download bytes and server requests. So the storage price is only one part of the total cost. In particular, they charge about the same price for data downloads. Considering they only offer infrastructure service, the price is much more expensive than http://www.DriveHQ.com, a leading cloud IT service provider that offers cloud-hosted File Server, FTP Server, Email Server, Web Server, Online Backup, Sharing and Collaboration services to SMBs.