Google announces Nearline Storage, a cloud-based alternative to the "cold" storage of infrequently accessed data similar to Amazon's Glacier service, only promising retrieval speeds of around three seconds.
Glacier, on the other hand, requires three to five hours to retrieve data, even if its costs are more or less the same (one cent per GB per month for data at rest)
"You should expect 4 MB/s of throughput per TB of data stored as Nearline Storage. This throughput scales linearly with increased storage consumption," Google states. "For example, storing 3 TB of data would guarantee 12 MB/s of throughput, while storing 100 TB of data would provide users with 400 MB/s of throughput."
In addition Google has partnerships with storage vendors Iron Mountain, NetApp, Geimare and Symantec/Veritas, to sell Nearline into the channel.
Nearline Storage is currently open as a beta service.