As part of its efforts to level the playing field against public cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services, Google Inc. today launched a new set of storage services that aim to make its cloud platform more appealing for large organizations with diverse workloads.

The first major addition is an archiving option called Coldline that is designed to safekeep infrequently used information for extended period of time. It’s similar in function to the Nearline service that Google rolled outlast  year and offers the same millisecond-range access speeds, but targets much lower-priority records that are typically pulled up less than once a year. This diverging focus is reflected mainly in their pricing: Keeping data in Coldline will cost only seven-tenths of a cent per gigabyte per month plus 0.05 per gigabyte retrieved compared with a penny per month with Nearline.

The expanded archiving is joined by a multi-regional storage tier that allows organizations to keep copies of their data in multiple geographic areas. If one of the facilities where a company’s information is stored goes offline, Google’s cloud platform will automatically reroute access requests to the other locations that are still operational. The search giant claims that this functionality makes it possible to keep important records available 99.95 percent of the time. That could also come handy for international companies that need to make their internal data quickly accessible from offices in multiple countries.

Coupled with Google’s existing single-region plans, customers now have access to four storage tiers in total. And they can quickly move records among plans as their requirements change thanks to a new lifecycle management feature rolling out. A company with long-term data retention requirements, for instance, could use the feature to move information from Nearline to Coldline after a certain period of time so to reduce storage costs.

Organizations whose needs are not fully addressed by the native feature set, meanwhile, will be able to buy software from the eight new partners that Google brought onboard as part of today’s upgrade. The list includes backup giant Veritas Technologies LLC,  secondary data management specialist Cohesity Inc. and a number of smaller startups.

Image via Google