Google pushes infrastructure-as-a-service into Europe

Google is expanding its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing platform into Europe and cutting the price of its cloud-based storage by 20%.

From December 1 2012 the price for up to 1TB of storage will be reduced by $0.025 per month to $0.095. This is $0.025 cheaper than Amazon's equivalent S3 storage cloud.

Barak Regev, European head of Google’s Cloud Platform, said the company can now host data in the EU. Google’s Cloud Platform now meets EC data compliance regulations, but Google's expansion into Europe also means data traffic is closer to where it is needed by European users.

The European datacentre supports Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL. The Compute platform, for hosting virtual machines is not yet available.

Google has introduced a lower-priced storage service called Durable Reduced Availability storage. Regev said Durable Reduced Availability storage is designed for non-operational class data storage. 

Google has also added a way to protect data from being accidentally deleted. The Object Versioning feature automatically keeps a history of old versions of data.

Google has also expanded its Cloud SQL database to support data sets up to 100GB and has increased the number of compute platform configurations available in the Google cloud to 36 types of workload. Virtual machines with up to eight cores and 30TB of memory are available.

Google provides Ubuntu but Regev said Google is planning to provide Red Hat and SuSE Linux support.

Companies using Google’s IaaS cloud computing platform include a manufacturer running simulations on a high performance computing (HPC) workload based on 10,000 cores for one hour. 

Regev added: “We have customers running Hadoop, batch processing.”

BigQuery, Google’s own big data analysis tool, is being used at Centerparcs to analyse big data to accommodation pricing across Europe.

Bioinformatics company, DNANexus, is using Google storage to store 350TB of DNA data.