Google lures businesses to Nearline with 100 PB of free cloud storage

Originally introduced to much fanfare in March, Cloud Storage Nearline now promises 99 percent uptime, on-demand I/O, lifecycle management and a broadly expanded partner ecosystem. Aiming to further sweeten the deal for companies currently using other providers, Google is now offering the service with 100 free petabytes of storage -- equivalent to 100 million gigabytes -- for new users for up to six months.

Google's standard pricing is one cent per GB per month, so the credit is essentially worth $1 million for each month it lasts.

Also free for a limited time is the service's new on-demand I/O feature, which is designed to give organizations a way to increase I/O in situations where they need to retrieve data faster than Nearline's provisioned read rate of 4 MB per second throughput per terabyte of data stored. For the first three months after launch, on-demand I/O will be offered at no additional charge.

Taking aim directly at Amazon, Google has even created a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator to estimate how much can be saved using Google's cloud storage rather than Amazon Web Services.

For companies that decide to switch, Google's Cloud Storage Transfer Service -- previously known as Online Cloud Import -- will import large amounts of online data from HTTP/HTTPS locations such as Amazon S3.

"You now will be able to configure one-time data migrations, as well as schedule recurring data transfers," explained Google product manager Avtandil Garakanidze in a Thursday blog post.

The Cloud Storage Transfer Service also allows users to perform lifecycle management, Garakanidze added, including automated archival to Cloud Storage Nearline and scheduled deletions.

Finally, Google has added five new companies to its Nearline partner ecosystem. The Actifio, Pixit Media, Unitrends, CloudBerry Filepicker join Veritas/Symantec, NetApp, Iron Mountain and Geminare.