Google chips at Amazon's Glacier with Cloud Storage Nearline Google wants to take a chunk out of Amazon's Glacier storage business with a cloud-based archive service that can start retrieving data in three seconds. The Google Cloud Storage Nearline service, now in beta, charges one cent per GB per month for data at rest. "Many of you operate a tiered data storage and archival process, …
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"The secret sauce behind the service, he explained, is that it uses the same bucket and object storage operations as the rest of Google's cloud storage,"
Translation - Google cloud is empty with near zero customers as Azure and AWS go from strength to strength so we have lots of spare storage that we need to do something with....
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>>I guess someone doesn't understand encryption. :)
I was going to say exactly the same thing.
You could encrypt it with a decently difficult key and a difficult passphrase, or if you're really paranoid, throw whatever you're sending to them into like five encrypted containers with progressively longer and harder key lengths and passphrases to the point where a bruteforce attack would take longer than the age of the universe. Its not hard or even all that time consuming to do.
Sure, it's 1c/GB/month if you put data in and never take it out. It's going to cost you a *lot* more if you ever want to take data out; and an arm and a leg if you want to move it out of Google's cloud. The same is true, by the way, of Glacier and the very similar Evault service (also disk-based).
Not saying that this is automatically a bad idea. Just saying that you need to understand that the cost is NOT only the 1c/GB of data at rest, so you need to give a little thought to what kind of data lifecycle is a good fit. For example, you have records that you have to keep for years on the off-chance they might be required in a lawsuit, or useful for some unforeseen analysis; or you have data that you need rarely yet unpredictably, like video footage you're holding on to for when some celebrity dies. But as a place to cheaply stash frequently-referenced data between uses, not so much.
If one of these guys is using tape, we could hope for a price war. At price parity and consumer as an end-user here, I'm not leaving Glacier. Photos and work docs when I leave is what I have in the big ice cube. Someone writes a nice interface like Fast Glacier and Google cuts their prices in half, I might consider switching. About taking it out, small users like me can trickle it out so I wouldn't pay to do that.
I sort of wonder why anyone would want to compete with a low-cost solution like Galcier. I mean, lets say you get a couple of big customers off Amazon, you only get a few dollars of revenue from it. I wonder where the return is - surely any reasonable sized user is encrypting everything they put there, aren't they? If it's just about contribution to costs (as it is for Amazon), then fair enough, but spending time and money 'competing' seems contrary to this.
In my case personally, I pay about $2/month for at-rest data in Glacier - by the end of the year, they might be taking $10/month off me, if I go crazy. I'd happily move my encrypted blobs of data somewhere else, and actually having some choices of destinations helps me out, but a price war of any kind isn't likely to make much difference to me, and probably isn't worth the dev time to change.
For those wondering where the return on this is, take a look at the retrieval and access costs of both AWS Glacier and Google Nearline. Both AWS and Glacier will make a decent, steady, unspectacular profit holding your data at rest "on ice" for years, with the volumes steadily growing. But it's going to cost you you an arm and a leg if you ever want that data back in a hurry, and your first-born child if you actually want to move it off their clouds.
So yes, it's an attractive price for an archival service -- but it's very expensive for anything you *expect* to retrieve.
Frankly, I'm amazed at how little attention any of the coverage of these services has paid to the potential retrieval costs -- even the usually-skeptical El Reg seems to have been blinded by the low cover charge...
Well, I wouldn't call it exactly cheap, terabyte of stored data will cost you $10 a month. That's $120 a year. At the same time you can buy a 1TB drive (hardly the cheapest per GB) for $65. Times 5 or 10 years (typical of long term storage) and it's going into serious money territory.
Or in other words, you can buy two drives a year for the price of same amount of Galcier storage!
For a storage that will cost you additionally to retrieve (realistically $0.10 per GB), those are exorbitant prices. It may be fine for occasional ODF, but it certainly is not for images, films, database dumps, etc..
> If one of these guys is using tape
no one with half a brain cell uses tape for cloud purposes.
> surely any reasonable sized user is encrypting everything they put there, aren't they?
baw haw ha ha ha! oh my. ha ha hahahahha
> Or in other words, you can buy two drives a year for the price of same amount of Galcier storage!
But you're forgetting that Glacier/Google are using erasure coding. So to do an equivalent you need at least a Raid6 but more like a zVol with 5 parity disks, active scrubbing and integrity checks. So let's say you have to build a ZFS server with enough disks and power it up every month and run a full check of all files each time.
No, Glacier et. al. are not cheap. But it's probably cheaper than you doing it yourself or if not that, at least better done than what your average joe could hope to do.
As a private user, I have around 5Tb of data which I hold on a Synology NAS box - a 4 disk raid. That cost me around £800 with 4 x 3Tb WD Red disks.
According to my calculations, the storage (never mind retrieval) costs at Google is around £1125.
It seems a no brainer to me..... [And I can host the Synology box at my sons house 200 miles away if I want the same bandwidth as google - the limit is to/from my house.]
Alan
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