Google Cloud is looking at helping enterprise organisations avoid bill shock with the launch of a storage growth plan for Google Cloud Storage.
The launch came about after Google noted the ‘astonishing and unpredictable’ rate at which data is created in its storage offerings. This is evidently not for a handful of photos and videos; companies who sign up to Storage Growth Plan are expected to hand over $10,000 per month for 12 months of Cloud Storage usage.
At the end of the year customers can either commit to the next 12 months at the rate of their peak usage. If it is within 30% of their original commitment, the previous year’s overage is free.
“We’ve developed the Storage Growth Plan to help enterprise customers manage storage costs and meet the forecasting and predictability that is often asked of IT organisations,” wrote Geoffrey Noer, Google Cloud product manager and Darren Strange, product marketing in a blog post.
“We heard from customers that data growth can be unpredictable, but costs can’t be. We’ve also heard that data can have unpredictable life cycles,” Noer and Strange added. “Consolidating storage into a centrally managed infrastructure resource can make life as a storage architect much easier. But the path to consolidation is fraught with complexity.”
This certainly makes sense. As this publication has frequently noted, different workloads suit different offerings. Some are so time- and resource-dependent that they can be used elsewhere at short notice; Google gives the example of a legacy image archive which could be reborn as an API training set. As ever Google wheeled out a customer already reaping the rewards; in this case pharmaceutical firm Recursion, whose biological image dataset is rapidly growing and is used to train neural networks.
The move can be seen as another way Google is trying to woo cloudy enterprise customers. In February CEO Thomas Kurian took his debut speaking platform, at a Goldman Sachs conference, to announce aggressive sales plans and give Google a stronger enterprise presence. Google Cloud acquired Alooma, an enterprise-focused data pipeline provider, later in the month.
Google Cloud also announced price drops to its cold yet low latency storage offering Coldline. The move comes after the company said Coldline in multi-regional locations was now geo-redundant, meaning data was protected from regional failure thanks to copies stored at least 100 miles away in a different region.
