Google's near-line storage offering

Yesterday, Google announced the beta of their Nearline Storage offering. It has the same 1c/GB/mo pricing as Amazon's Glacier, but it has three significant differences:

• It claims to have much lower latency, a few seconds instead of a few hours.
• It has the same (synchronous) API as Google's more expensive storage, where Glacier has a different (asynchronous) API than S3.
• Its pricing for getting data out lacks Glacier's 5% free tier, but otherwise is much simpler than Glacier's.

As I predicted at Glacier's launch, Amazon stuck with the 1c/GB/mo price point while, albeit slowly, the technology got cheaper. So they have room to cut prices in response, but I'd bet that they won't.

I believe I know how Google has built their nearline technology, I wrote about it two years ago.