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Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

41–50 of 188 posts

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#41
post #38
post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Yes, but would you spend weeks uploading your 4TB?

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#42
post #10

The detailed pricing is at https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#nearline-pricing In short, if I'm understanding correctly: $0.01 per GB per month storage $0.01 per GB retrieval Normal egress fees on top, so additional ~$0.10 per GB if you want to retrieve outside of Google Cloud. Early deletion fee. Effectively just a minimum storage charge of 1 month. It seems this is cheaper than Glacier and quite a bit simpler…

Unless Glacier just changed their pricing, how is it cheaper and simpler? Glacier is also $.01/GB storage, but only $.09/GB retrieval, which is cheaper than google's $.12/GB. Glacier also comes with 1st GB retrieval free/mo.

Glacier have additional fees depending on how fast you retrieve the data. Honestly I'm not sure what they are because I've never had to use it, but my impression is that these fees could be quite high.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#44
post #41
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Yes, but would you spend weeks uploading your 4TB?

Well... yeah. But it doesn't cost me any money to restore either, so it's much cheaper. I don't think they're going to feel threatened by this.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#45
post #38
post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Backblaze can probably afford to be $5/mo per computer because the average computer using it has less than 4TB; OTOH, if there is a more cost effective option for the low end, it won't make sense to use Backblaze on the low end, which will drive up Backblaze's sustainable per computer price.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#46
post #38
post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

Well, I would guess the number of people who need to backup 4T is rather small.

My thinking is that most people likely max out well below the 0.5T that the same $5 buys you on Google now, making that variant actually cheaper for them than Backblaze.

For those people it means paying less per month and getting privacy and better control (data retention!) in return. Should be a no-brainer.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#47
post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

For disaster recovery Nearline's speed restriction can be prohibitive. Not everyone can afford to wait 3 days for their backups to download.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#48
post #36

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

> the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears.

Hardly. I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call. A number that's not software developer/ sys admin who has no idea why I'm calling about my mom's missing holiday photos.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#49
post #10

The detailed pricing is at https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#nearline-pricing In short, if I'm understanding correctly: $0.01 per GB per month storage $0.01 per GB retrieval Normal egress fees on top, so additional ~$0.10 per GB if you want to retrieve outside of Google Cloud. Early deletion fee. Effectively just a minimum storage charge of 1 month. It seems this is cheaper than Glacier and quite a bit simpler…

Unless Glacier just changed their pricing, how is it cheaper and simpler? Glacier is also $.01/GB storage, but only $.09/GB retrieval, which is cheaper than google's $.12/GB. Glacier also comes with 1st GB retrieval free/mo.

Except for the Glacier retrieval fees which can be insane if you choose to retrieve more than 0.17% of your stored data per day.

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret...

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Storage Nearline

#50
post #10

The detailed pricing is at https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#nearline-pricing In short, if I'm understanding correctly: $0.01 per GB per month storage $0.01 per GB retrieval Normal egress fees on top, so additional ~$0.10 per GB if you want to retrieve outside of Google Cloud. Early deletion fee. Effectively just a minimum storage charge of 1 month. It seems this is cheaper than Glacier and quite a bit simpler…

Unless Glacier just changed their pricing, how is it cheaper and simpler? Glacier is also $.01/GB storage, but only $.09/GB retrieval, which is cheaper than google's $.12/GB. Glacier also comes with 1st GB retrieval free/mo.

Glacier pricing is surprisingly complicated, and the actual cost can be much higher than $0.01 per GB-month if you don't read the fine print.

The biggest gotcha is that you can only access 0.17% of the data you've stored in any given day without extra charges. So if you've stored 1000 GB, you can only access 1.7 GB per day for free.

The cost for going over your daily "retrieval allowance" can be large, because cost is driven by "peak retrieval rate". They find the highest hourly retrieval rate over the entire month, and charge the whole month's retrieval at the peak rate.

This can get expensive fast. Again, with 1000 GB stored, if you retrieve 200 GB over the course of 4 hours, your hourly retrieval rate is 200 GB / 4 hours = 50 GB per hour. Your free retrieval allowance is 1.7 GB per day / 24 hours = 0.07 GB / hour. So your excess retrieval is 49.93 GB per hour.

Amazingly, that 49.93 GB per hour for 4 hours is charged for all 720 hours in the month, so that's 49.93 * 720 * 0.01 = $359.49.

That's an astonishing $1.79 per GB just to retrieve one-fifth of the data from Glacier storage.

So Glacier only makes sense for true cold storage, where you are very unlikely to touch more than 0.00007 of it in any given hour.

Google's Nearline is much simpler and faster for the same storage cost -- and far cheaper if you need to access more than a tiny fraction of the data.

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retr...

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