Google Cuts Cloud Storage Pricing 20%, Adds Durable Reduced Availability Option

Google cut the price of its standard Cloud Storage service by over 20% and announced a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage, which is an archival service with longer data retrieval times. 

Another new feature is Persistent Disk Snapshotting, which enables the user to crete an instant backup of a disk and then move it around Google datacenters in order to startup a new VM.  

Google has also continued to add to its European datacenter support, which lets the users assign applications, data and virtual machines to European Datacenter for regulatory compliance and to be closer to customers.

http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/11/google-cloud-platform-new-features.html

In June, Google introduced its Compute Engine service, which provides on-demand, virtual Linux machines at Google scale. The service lets you run large-scale computing workloads on the same infrastructure that runs Google Search, Gmail and Ads. 

"Ten thousand cores is really cool," said Urs Hölzle, Google's Sr. VP of Technical Infrastructure, and then demonstrating a genomics application being instantly scaled to a further 600,000 cores. Google is promising up to 50% more computer power per dollar compared to other cloud computing service providers. The price for one virtual core starts at $0.145 per hour. The service is live now and a Developers Guide with open APIs is available.