Google Cloud Storage Classes

Modern enterprises today demand safe data management along with easily accessible environments. The days of exchanging drives and heavy email attachments are gone. Today’s organizations landscape demands real time, on demand, safe access to company data, ability to collaborate without bothering about where data is stored, how its multiple versions to be managed etc. The concept of storing data on cloud has caught up very fast, cloud storage has become a means of storing data over the Internet instead of storing premises arrays. There are many cloud stores available in market popular ones are Google cloud, IBM cloud, Azure cloud and so on. 

In this article we will learn more about Google storage and understand how it works, its features, functions and limitations in this article.   

What is Google Cloud Storage?

Google storage is one of the best enterprise public cloud storage platforms available today for large organizations and enterprises. Google cloud storage is part of Google cloud platform and offers object storage with no limit on amount of data stored or size of the object.

It has low latency and high durability service and data is spread across multiple locations around the world. It can be accessed via command line or web browser. It is designed to store large, unstructured data sets. Google also offers database storage options, including Cloud Datastore for NoSQL non relational storage, Cloud SQL for MySQL fully relational storage and Google’s native Cloud Bigtable database.

The 100 GB storage plan costs $1.99 a month (or $19.99 a year), and then storage increases to 200GB at $2.99 a month, and 2TB at $9.99 a month.  

Google Cloud Storage Classes

It has a choice of several ‘storage classes’ to suit different user requirements. The storage classes are:

• Standard,
• Nearline,
• Coldline and
• Archive.

All classes have unlimited data offering, common tools and APIs for data access, Open Authorization (OAuth) and granular access controls, access to other Google Cloud Storage services and a pay-per-use model.

Google offers free account up to 15 GB space for individual usages however for commercial usage it offers three subscription plans 100 GB, 200 GB and 2 TB.

Comparison Table: Storage Classes

Below table summarizes the differences between the the four different types of storage classes:

Exact pricing is worked out on the basis of several factors such as amount of data stored, the amount that is read and moved between your storage “buckets,” the number of operations you carry out (which can include listing objects), data retrieval and its early deletion. 

Features of Google Cloud Storage  

• Object lifecycle management helps to save money as you can setup conditions for when data will be deleted or moved to less expensive storage class as per business requirement.
• Long list of storage bucket locations around the regions to ensure you can choose location based on your businesses and also setup multiple redundancy options. 
• It offers storage transfer service and transfer service for on premises data so that you get the speed and scalability on performance while doing large data transfers.  
• Eliminates the need for buying and managing own storage infrastructure, increasing agility, providing global scale, and delivering “anywhere, anytime” data.
• Cloud storage is meant to support multi-tenancy architecture and provides multiple layers of security 
• Allows simpler data migrations by having ability to add new nodes and retire old ones when required to eliminate disruptive data migrations. 
• Disaster recovery is less expensive as data can be automatically replicated from a private cloud to a public cloud or multiple public clouds at a fraction of costs incurred in building a new data centre. 

How to create a Google Storage Account?

• Create a GCP account.
• Open Google Cloud Console in a browser.
• Create a new account by clicking Create account.

• Register your corporate email address as a Google account. Or you can use a Gmail account or other Google account. (When creating free account).
• Continue to the Google Cloud Console and accept the GCP terms presented.
• You will receive a verification mail post that account is created and you can login to Google drive.
• Post login ‘My Drive’ option files can be stored or folders can be created.

Interesting facts!

Google drive has 2 billion monthly active users.

 More than 6 million paying customers.