This is an older piece which I just ran across at Forbes from March of this year. But I found the direct comparison, and Googles dishonest approach, interesting.
Forbes:
According to Google, Nearline offers slightly lower availability and slightly higher latency than the company’s standard storage product but with a lower cost. The “time to first byte” of approximately 2 – 5 seconds was held up by most commentators, myself included, as a real game changer. (..)
So, if a customer stores 1TB of data within Nearline, their download will start within 2 – 5 seconds, and then promptly take 73 hours to complete (assuming they are downloading 1TB at 4 MB/second).
Comparing the same 1TB case with Amazon Glacier. AWS will have that object available to customers in approximately 3 – 5 hours. Four hours into their download, a Google Nearline customer would be 5% complete on downloading their 1TB of data with approximately 69 hours to completion.
In short:
So it seems that Google has purposely muddied the message here and AWS, whose retrieval time looks slothful, is, in fact, faster than that of Googles.
“Google – We’re better at marketing than at cloud”
