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(Google graphic.)

Google Cloud Platform today moved to compete more directly with cloud market leader Amazon Web Services, revamping its storage offerings, introducing a new “cold storage” service and cutting some prices at the same time.

At its GCP Next conference in London, Google proclaimed it is the “perennial price leader” in cloud, The Register reported.

In a blog post, Google — by most measures ranked third behind AWS and Microsoft Azure — said its new Coldline storage class is meant for long-term archiving and disaster recovery. The name echoes AWS’s Glacier, which is intended for the same purposes.

Coldline offers “instant (millisecond)” access to data typically accessed less than once a year and costs $0.007 per gigabyte per month, plus an access fee of $0.05 per GB retrieved. Those fees are identical to Glacier’s, though AWS recommends that service “where a retrieval time of several hours is suitable.”

migration service to Coldline or Google’s other storage options may include several months of free storage of up to 100 PB.

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(Google graphic.)

As to the rest of its other storage options, Google has broken them down by geographic availability rather than intended use. Multi-Regional Storage provides redundancy among several regions, for greatest security. In case of an outage, it routes requests to another available region. Intended for the highest availability of data, this option costs $0.026 per GB per month and is available in the U.S., the E.U. and Asia. All existing Standard storage buckets in a multi-regional location have automatically been converted to this option.

Regional Storage operates within a single region and is priced at $0.02 per GB per month, a 23 percent price cut. All existing Standard storage buckets ina a single region have been converted to this option, and the price drop for converted buckets starts Nov. 1. The existing Nearline Storage, for data accessed less than once a month, costs $0.01 per GB per month. All the storage offerings promise at least 99 percent availability and “millisecond” access.

Speaking at GCP Next, head of solutions architecture Miles Ward claimed Google is the cloud’s perennial leader on price, according to The Register.

He claimed a maximum possible discount on GCP pricing of 89 percent if a customer is being “programmatic,” using software to finely manage services, instances and containers. Otherwise, he said, an “average” discount of 59 percent could be calculated employing elements such as AWS right-sizing recommendations.

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