Google Storage vs. Amazon S3

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If you have a Google Storage for Developers account (through invitation only), good for you because you can continue to use the 100GB free storage as long as Google Storage is still in preview mode.

If you don’t have a Google Storage for Developers account already, you can sign up with billing information. You don’t get the 100GB free storage but you can use up to 1 Terabyte of storage as long as your billing info allows.

It is now in this Preview/Production mixed mode. Before long, Google Storage may enter into the full production mode, competing with Amazon S3 for the cloud storage business.

If you are new to the cloud storage, you may be looking for some review materials to decide which one you will use. This article will compare them from different aspects.

1. Reliability and Availability

Google offers 99.9% uptime for its storage. Amazon S3 offers 99.9% uptime as well. Since google.com and amazon.com are all high availability sites, we can say we trust them to be the field experts knowing how to maintain high availability of a system over Internet.

2. Pricing

Google Storage – $0.17/GB/month

Amazon S3 – 0.15/GB/month

Amazon S3 also have other promotions that lowers the storage price. Overall, Amazon S3 is less expensive.

3. Speed

Speed topic is all relative. It depends on many factors. The biggest factor is how close you are to the datacenter that is serving you the cloud storage. If you conduct speed test on different location, different date and time, the answer could vary.

Instead of saying who’s faster and who’s slower, we prefer to just introduce a way to compare and the readers can do the test themselves.

We use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to do the test. Amazon S3 East bucket is mounted as a virtual folder, so does a Google Storage for Developers account.

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Then we do upload/download of a 31M zip file to those virtual folders in sequence and time the duration with stop watch.

  Upload (sec) Download (sec)
Google Storage 211 30
Amazon S3 210 33

It looks like they have comparable speeds.

4. Access Method – Web

They both have web browser access to the storage objects. You can use AWS Console to access S3 objects.

You can use Google Storage Manager for Google storage.

5. Access Method – PC & File Server

Google Storage API is compatible with Amazon S3 API. This means 3rd party tools working for one is pretty much working for the other. If you need Desktop access to both, you can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop. If you need File Server access as a gateway to both, you can use Gladinet CloudAFS.

6. Backup Tools

Most of the time, you need the cloud storage because you need an off-site backup solution. You just need a solution sitting on your PC, monitoring the changes for important files and backup online. If you are considering using either Amazon S3 or Google Storage, you can try Gladinet Cloud Backup, which can take snapshots of folders and files and ship them to s=S3 and Google.

Related Posts:

Windows Azure Storage vs. Google Storage

Which Google User Are You

Cloud Gateway to Google Storage

Comments

Vitaly said…
didn't google promised $0.25/GB/year price?
November 24, 2010 at 10:28 AM
CentreStack said…
There are 3 kind of google storage.
(1) personal - very cheap
(2) Google Apps - not cheap
(3) Google Storage for developer - not cheap

See this blog for the differences:

http://gladinet.blogspot.com/2010/08/many-different-kind-of-google-storage.html
December 1, 2010 at 9:50 AM
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