Google drops the price of Cloud Storage service

Google has cut the price of its Cloud Storage, a hosted service designed for enterprise developers who want to store their applications' data in the cloud, as opposed to in their own servers. The fees, based on monthly usage, have been cut between 8 percent and 15 percent, depending on the amount of data involved, said Navneet Joneja, product manager for Google Cloud Storage. "We're committed to building extremely high availability storage in the cloud". The price cuts will be applied retroactively to March 1st. Google announced that several enterprise storage vendors have partnered with it and started to use Cloud Storage commercially in their products, including Panzura, StorSimple and Gladinet. Cloud Storage was launched in beta version in 2010 with the name Google Storage for Developers, and shed the test label and its original name in October of last year. It is intended as a cloud storage service for heavy-duty, enterprise applications that generate and contain massive amounts of data, not as an end user service where individuals can store files, like the Picasa Web photo manager, the Docs office productivity suite and YouTube for storing and sharing videos.