The public cloud is not new to price competition, but the latest offer from Google may just take the cake. Accompanying the launch of its ultra-low-cost cold nearline service into general availability this morning is a special promotion that will enable organizations to store up to 100 petabytes of their data in the hosted archive for free.

The catch – there’s always a catch – is that the credit only lasts six months. But that’s enough for the Switch and Save program, as the promotion is called, to achieve its goal: lure organizations into moving data from the rivaling public cloud or on-premise archiving solution they’re using now to the Google Cloud Platform.

After that, the company sees the chance of those users fully committing to the transition increasing considerably. And for good reason. Google Storage Nearline is priced at about the same rate as the competing Glacier cloud archiving service from arch-nemesis Amazon  Inc. but stores data on readily-available instead of completely offline disks.

As a result, the search engine is able to fetch files in under three seconds instead of the several hours that the same operation takes on its competitor’s platform. That’s a potentially major selling point for organizations such as banks that need fairly regular access to their archived records for periodical audits and other important but relatively low-IO activities.

However, the potential of the new Switch and Save program doesn’t stop at merely boosting Google’s archiving revenue. After all, once an organization has multiple petabytes of its most valuable historical data on the search giant’s infrastructure, the CIO is more than likely to start giving its complementary analytic services a closer look. And from there, a six-month credit line can potentially balloon into a lucrative company-wide deal encompassing multiple different features and resource types.

Photo via Google