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Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#12
post #3

It looks like an amount of space hard to fill with meaningful data. I wonder if they would prevent people from filling it with random junk just for fun.

Only hard to fill if you're dealing with text only. Say you're building a video copyright detection crawler and you want to store videos from all over the internet.

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#14
I am absolutely blown away with the 100 PB for every customer... Meaning all together they must have somewhere in the exabyte to zettabyte range or are completely betting on the fact that no one will be able to/actually be willing fill this/their cloud. I guess I am just not used to the fact that on average most people have at least a 1 TB hard drive or hard drives that add up to 1 TB...

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#15

6 months of free storage is a no brainer business strategy. Once you get anywhere near 100PB of data loaded, are you really going to move it elsewhere after 6 months?

We (rsync.net) maintain 's3cmd' and 'gsutil' in our environment, so you can do direct cloud cloud transfers from either amazon or google to and from rsync.net.

We don't have a cold storage product, so perhaps not relevant for nearline ... but it is relevant for their online options. You do have the ability to migrate to another provider.

Two random notes:

- we're announcing zfs send/recv[1] as a transport in the next few days and there will be s3-competitive pricing for this product at TB+ levels.

- "HN readers discount" is still available all these years later. Just email.

[1] over SSH

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#16
post #3

It looks like an amount of space hard to fill with meaningful data. I wonder if they would prevent people from filling it with random junk just for fun.

How much space a site like imgur needs?

Its a different use case, cold storage vs content delivery...

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#17
As cute as it is to have $.01/GB backup storage....every time you pull out a backup it costs you $.13/GB.

That is a pretty steep hit when you can use a lower quality object store:

https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml

For $.01/GB and $.01/GB to pull.

Yeah, it may not be as highly available as Nearline but for the 99% of the time it is available...you don't have a 3 second delay and you aren't paying a 13x premium to pull data out.

For instance, lets say you have a 50GB backup that you automatically verify via a testing process. You don't want to burden the disks of your primary datastore longer than you have to [the source of the backup] so your workflow is:

Database Server -> Create Backup Locally -> Push Backup to Object Store Bucket [$.50/month to store the backup, assume you store 7 days] -> Spin up VM which pulls from Object Store Bucket and verifies the backup [$.06/day for an 4GB Linode for an hour to do this which is plenty of RAM and time ] -> Pull the Backup & Verify [$.50/Day]

30 Days Backup Cost:

$20.30/month to maintain a week of verified backups with RunAbove = (7 * 50 * .01) + (30 * .06) + (30 * .01 * 50)

$200.30/month to maintain a week of verified backups with Nearline = (7 * 50 * .01) + (30 * .06) + (30 * .13 * 50)

I don't know why anyone would willingly pay an order of magnitude more for cold storage.

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#18
post #14

I am absolutely blown away with the 100 PB for every customer... Meaning all together they must have somewhere in the exabyte to zettabyte range or are completely betting on the fact that no one will be able to/actually be willing fill this/their cloud. I guess I am just not used to the fact that on average most people have at least a 1 TB hard drive or hard drives that add up to 1 TB...

It would be insanely easy to copy data over and over until you hit 100PB. This number still seems crazy

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#19

From the details (in an image, some in fine print on the image) on the offer: that's if you migrate at least 1PB into Google Cloud Nearline in the first 3 months, and maintain at least 1PB in Google Clound Nearline for at least 12 months. And its only 1 month free at that level of commitment; anything more than 1 month requires a migration commitment to more than the 1PB. EDIT: At the time this comment was written, t…

Once the free period is over the 100PB will cost $1 million per month in storage fees alone. Will the free month(s) even cover the retrieval and transfer fees to take 100PB out of another cloud?

Re: Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability

#20
Are there any well accepted theories as to how these (Nearline & Glacier) systems function? I know with Glacier, I've heard powering down hard-drives, advanced compression (explains 3hr retrieval), and blu-ray storage (explains 3 month minimum). With Nearline bringing access down to 3secs for the same cost, and now with On-Demand IO, I really don't know what to speculate. Assuming I/O is limited due to spread across media, how could that be scaled up on-demand?
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