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Google Cloud The Almighty Buck

Google Cuts Prices On Enterprise Cloud Services 43

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Google has made sizable price cuts across its storage, compute and BigQuery analysis services (e.g., Google BigQuery on-demand prices have been reduced by up to 85%). Google has also introduced a number of new services, including managed virtual machines, an extension of BigQuery for live data and the ability to run copies of the enterprise-ready Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux and Windows Server 2008 R2. Collectively, these announcements show that Google may be coming to understand that 'they really need to step it up' in the market for cloud computing services, said John Rymer, Forrester Research's principal analyst covering application development and delivery."
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Google Cuts Prices On Enterprise Cloud Services

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  • by OffTheLip ( 636691 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @09:29AM (#46583377)
    What a deal!
  • Google has a *long* way to go. Unless they allow their customers to select the operating system (by providing IaaS), this just won't fly long term. We looked at using Google, but we need Windows Server 2012 for some of the things we wanted to move out of our datacenters. And SQL Server. They provide/allow neither.
  • The Big Data Crash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by broward ( 416376 ) <.browardhorne. .at. .gmail.com.> on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @09:50AM (#46583551) Homepage

    The Big Data Crash began about a year ago. Google jiggered the numbers from its own Trends tool sometime earlier this year to disguise it, but you can still still it happening on Indeed.com/jobtrends page. Most likely, they're cutting prices in the face of declining rate-of-increase in demand. i wrote this article about it six months ago -

    http://nodemy.jit.su/post/TheB... [nodemy.jit.su]

    • I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.

      And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

        You don't have a bank account? Credit cards? No entry in the credit reporting agency databases?

        Oh, OK, I get it -- you don't manually store financial data in consumer cloud services on your own, but you still have your financial data in cloud(s) somewhere, it's just not under your control.

    • by mlts ( 1038732 )

      The problem is that there is craploads of bandwidth available on the LAN... but here in the US, WAN connections are relatively slow and pricy.

      A good example of this is the few terabytes of space I have on Google Drive. If I want to kick a terabyte of data across a cable link, there is a good chance that I'd be handed a $250 bill for the bandwidth used. If I tried moving a TB over LTE... that will be a five digit bill on every single cellular provider in the US. So, the cloud storage is nice... but storin

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        There's plenty of market where they need something like an SQL server, which is low bandwidth, but the customer doesn't have the funds for a $10k server and $90k/year admin to run it, so they opt for $100/month from a cloud service.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Interesting graphs you got from google trends six months ago. Sharp declines that look like they are going over a cliff. Have you checked the data recently to see where that cliff has headed since? I'll give you a hint: up. Up to its highest level of all time. More people are interested in big data than ever before. Could it be that their infrastructure is improving and getting cheaper and therefore they can charge less... Like almost every technology for the last 50 years? But yeah... it could be do

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that news regarding big data mining by eg. the NSA and governments is coming to public knowledge.

    • Cool story bro (ward).

    • by alen ( 225700 )

      most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space
      for larger organizations with terabytes or hundreds of TB of data it doesn't make any sense to dump their data into this cloud thing

      • by Slashdot Parent ( 995749 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @01:03PM (#46585315)

        most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space

        It kinda sorta depends.

        My current client is a large enough organization to operate its own datacenters in multiple geographic locations. All of their ordinary computational and storage needs are met by company-owned and operated infrastructure. That being said, if I were to email the storage team and the Unix team and say, "Hey, I'm going to need 1000 nodes and 500TB of network attached storage for a Hadoop cluster to do some analysis. I estimate that the analysis will take roughly one week to complete, so I'll only need those resources for 2 weeks," they would not be able to satisfy that request. However, if I called up our Amazon Web Services contact and said the same thing, he'd respond with a price quote.

        Also, even though we have multiple datacenters, we still use Amazon CloudFront. Just because we have multiple datacenters doesn't mean that we operate them all over the world.

        So even decent-sized organizations can have a use for "that thar cloud thingydingy".

        • by Anonymous Coward

          the GP was referring to something else. the value you get from tapping big data for your decision making. E.g. why would say walmart analyze their sales data? So they start analyzing sales trends, and gain a HUGE benefit from smarter decision making... Then they try to repeat that, and again, they realize a huge monetary gain. Then they do it again, and the gain is smaller this time... and no matter what they try to do with that sales data, they can't get more value squeezed out of that big data analytic th

  • IPv6 support? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Do their VMs support IPv6 yet, or are they still stuck in IPv4 land only? I was quite shocked to find a product launched in this decade didn't have IPv6 connectivity out of the box.

  • by Daltorak ( 122403 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @10:19AM (#46583771)

    Windows Server 2008 R2 came out almost FIVE YEARS AGO and only now are they introducing experimental support for it??
    Mainstream support for 2008 R2 ends in less than a year!

    • Yeah, sad really. But mainstream support ends next year (Jan 1, 2015) but extended goes on till 2020. Meaning licenses from MSFT - tough to get and support for new product releases may not support 2008 but patches etc. keep on going.

      2003 however dies as far as all support offerings in July 2015...

      • by jp10558 ( 748604 )

        Now that I did not know. Silly me, I thought they would keep mainstream support for Server 2008 R2 through Windows 7 lifetime.

        This is why I try and do everything possible on RHEL derivatives, 10 yr support cycle so I'm upgrading when I have time and features I want, not because security updates are stopping.

        • Well on 2008 R2 you're getting just over 10 years but MSFT picks some pretty weird dates for retirement. January 14, 2020 for example. I'm not saying I agree with it but it seems that they've been a bit more aggressive when it comes to retiring things after all the FUD around XP's retirement date. Windows 7 BTW has the same retirement dates for mainstream and extended end of life as 2008 R2 so no worries there I guess so they don't want to have a repeat it would seem for XP.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      It's not hard to see Google being reluctant/unwilling to do anything to encourage the use of Microsoft products. Google's economy of scale on hosting is probably greatly reduced when having to support a Microsoft OS as well.

  • You never know when Google is going to pull the plug. You have been warned.

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

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