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Google Nearline Vs. Amazon Glacier

And the winner is ...

Few weeks ago, Google announced a new product, Nearline, to compete with Amazon’s storage services, especially Glacier, for archiving big amount of data online.

Nearline is a low-cost, secure, fast service with 3s to access stored files, downloading at 4MB/s per terabyte, a speeed increasing linearly for each terabyte stored, and furthermore with the advantage of using the same interface that everyone gets from Google’s other services, like Gmail and Google Drive.

But is it really cheaper and faster? Is the linear 4MB/s download speed fast enough? To figure it out, you will find below two comparison charts, the first one with Glacier’s and Nearline’s principal specifications, and the second one being a speed and cost chart to store an example of 500TB, adding 1TB and retrieving 1TB weekly, and deleting or overwriting 2TB per month.

SPECIFICATIONS
  Amazon Glacier Google Nearline
Retrieval limit* No limit or customizable No limit
Retrieval speed 4 / 8 or 28 hours Linear 4MB/s for every terabyte stored
Time to begin retrieval 3h – 5h 3s
Free retrieval allowance per day 0.17% of the data No free retrieval
Limit days for deletion 90 30
Storage cost $0.01 per GB $0.01 per GB
Retrieval cost $0.01 per GB $0.01 per GB
Early deletion cost $0.01 to $0.03 per GB $0.01 per GB per day
Transfer cost 1GB free then from $0.09 per GB to $0.02 per GB defending on the amount of GB and the transfer region $0.08 per GB to $0.23 per GB depending on the transfer region

*Retrieval limit: Amazon offers a customizable limit for retrieval or transfer, which means that you can limit the data for transfer per month and avoid additional billing. Nearline, does not offer this option. If not customized, there is no limit. 

  • Storage Price: Draw

As you can see below, the price is nearly the same for a base storage of 500TB and the monthly 1TB retrieval and storage added per week. Google and Amazon offer the same price for storage and retrieval, $0.01. If we compare both services with our example, it would be $10.9 per TB per month for Glacier and $11.2 per TB per month for Nearline. The two providers are not competing on prices, but on performances.

EXAMPLE WITH 500TB OF BASE STORAGE
  Amazon Glacier Google Nearline
Base storage 500TB 500TB
Weekly storage addition 1TB 1TB
Weekly retrieval 1TB 1TB
Early monthly data overwritten or deleted 2TB 2TB
Time to begin retrieval 3h to 5h 3s
Retrieval speed 278MB/s 2,000MB/s
Total download time 4h 8mins
Monthly base storage cost $5,000 $5,000
Weekly additional 1TB cost $10 $10
Weekly retrieval cost $0 $10
Monthly transfer out cost (basic regions) $360 $480
Monthly override or deletion cost $60 $20
Monthly cost $5,460 $5,580
Final price/TB/month $10.9 $11.2
  • Retrieval and Transfer: Glacier wins

Not like Google, Amazon offers 5% of the amount stored for free retrieval per month, and then $0.01 per additional gigabyte. In this example, 5% of the data stored would be 25TB, and we are only using 4TB. For retrieving 25TB of data, Google would charge $250. Concerning transfer out, even being cheaper than Nearline, Amazon has a dozen of different prices for regions. Couldn’t they simplify it as Google did it with their worldwide price, just another prices for China and for Australia? Is there a sense to it? It is surely an infrastructure problem.

  • Data Override and Deletion: Nearline wins

Google offers a limit of 30 days before you can delete your data with an early deletion cost of 0.01$ per day, versus Amazon which offers 90 days and three times the amount while deleting in the first month, two times the amount deleting on the second month and the same price as Nearline while deleting the last third month. If you need to replace data every month or even every two months, you better go with Nearline.

  • Data Access Time: Nearline wins

if you want to access your data on Glacier, you need to make a request to Amazon , and then they take up from 3 to 5 hours to make your data available for download or transfer. In Nearline, there’s no need for request. You have access to your data in 3s, which is incredibly faster.

  • Download Speed: Nearline wins

For 500TB, Nearline’s retrieval speed rises up to 2,000MB/s, which is pretty fast compared to Amazon’s speed of 278MB/s. But do you have 2,000MB/s of bandwidth available? Theorically the download with Nearline would take 8mn versus 4h with Glacier.

  • Conclusion

In conclusion, Nearline is the winner in accessibility and speed, but there is no real big difference in price. Would Nearline kill Amazon’s Glacier service? Today the comparison is largely in favor of Nearline, the large gap in performance being explained by the technology used by the two companies, probably low access time LTO tapes into libraries for Amazon, faster optical and magnetic disks by Google.

If you are thinking about switching from Glacier to Nearline, before doing it, you need to know a few things:

  • Nearline is still in beta version.
  • Having only 1TB stored, to retrieve them, it would last a massive 70 hours, 66 additional hours comparing it to Glacier’s minimum retrieval time, and not counting the additional 3-5h after request.
  • If you want a decent retrieval speed, or a speed better than Glacier’s 4 hours, you need at least 20TB of data stored in Nearline to best those 4 hours, which would take 3h 40mn to download 1TB at 80MB/s.

The war just begins for cloud storage of massive data. Wait for better performances and lower prices.

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