Google Cloud steps up storage game to court Hollywood, launches Filestore

Google Cloud Platform's Transfer Appliance is also generally available.

Google Cloud launched a new region in Los Angeles, outlined a network attached storage service and made its Transfer Appliance designed to move petabytes of data generally available.

The moves add up to an effort to target media companies and enterprises working with content creators.

Google launched a service called Cloud Filestore that can be handy for movie and production studios that have to render CGI images and move large files efficiently.

Cloud Filestore enables customers to stand up a managed network-attached storage (NAS) setup with Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances. Filestore will be available as a storage option in the Google Cloud Platform console.

Dominic Preuss, director of product management at Google Cloud, said the expansion into LA was largely driven by customers that wanted a low latency place to run jobs and store data. Preuss noted that media and entertainment were among Google Cloud Platform's key verticals.

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Preuss explained that render farms are one of the primary use cases for Filestore. "If you are a studio or firm working on a piece that takes two or three years you need a last rendering for the effects," he said. "You may need 20,000 to 50,000 cores and don't want to own that infrastructure. You want to run jobs and give that capacity back."

Filestore will have a premium tier for 30 cents per GB per month and a standard tier at 20 cents per GB a month. The premium instance of Filestore can provide up to 700 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS regardless of instance capacity. The goal for Google is to provide a cloud option for rendering movies--that process usually revolves around on-premises hardware, files and software.

Google Cloud's Transfer Appliance is also generally available with new features. Customers have been using the Transfer Appliance for about a year so Google Cloud could get feedback.

The service has two configurations--100TB or 480TB of raw storage. Compression rates are usually 2x raw capacity. The 100TB appliance will cost $300 with express shipping usually about $500. The 480TB model will run you $1,800 plus about $900 in shipping.

Enterprises are likely to use Google Cloud's Transfer Appliance to migrate data centers to the cloud, transferring data for analytics and moving large archives of content.

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