The unlimited storage that Google promised my university is being discontinued
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The cost of storage at Google's scale is low. GPUs/TPUs are another thing entirely.
2020: $41b operating income. 2021: $78b operating income (+$37b in one year).
2018: $31b operating income. 2019: $36b operating income.
So they just added an entire 2018 or 2019 size profit to their outcome in the past year.
That didn't come from squeezing pennies on little storage products and the like. That's from one of the world's largest snowballs continuing to roll down hill, piling up tens of billions in trivially easy profit addition as they go. When it comes to expanding margins, for an organization the size of Google that is still expanding relatively quickly in sales, it's far more important to hold down cost expansion as the profit soars (don't add those entirely unnecessary 20,000 heads) than it is to cut rounding error costs. Microsoft has similarly been masterful about doing that lately (unlike during the Ballmer era).
Their deal with Apple ensures their staying power. They own the other half of the Mobile ecosystem so even when lockdowns end and travel opens up there may be even more usage.
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q4_alphabet_earnings...
But when other companies do it, they tell you that it’s not forever. I suspect other companies want you to still be a customer in 5 years.
End storage for new users, don’t just go telling scientists you’re going to delete their stuff.
Google should watch out, if people no longer get any perceived utility from their services, they will find themselves destitute. A true ad company with a search engine and no innovation as Peter Thiel describes them.
I would rather pay Apple than Google.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-g...
I can't imagine their cloud division ever winning with Amazon and Azure exactly because there are happy GSuite/Youtube/etc. customers like me around, making sure no one ever trusts them for anything again.
[0] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/google-wo..., the "new storage policy" section.
Buy a new phone and get unlimited data*
* Speeds may be throttled after a certain about of data usage
Technically still unlimited.
If there is a cap of 1 byte per hour, there is absolutely a limit of 720 bytes per 30 day month. Whenever there is a cap, it is not "technically unlimited".
And that's why there's typically a 2nd asterisk about speeds dependent on network conditions. Still legally advertised as unlimited, thanks to the fine print.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/21/22848536/mint-mobile-pre...
Deprioritized data is still allowed to be advertised as "unlimited" if it is not throttled to 2G speeds.
> We will contact impacted institutions directly in the coming weeks to discuss a range of options for getting the storage they need
Given the quota model, it doesn't seem like notifying individual users would have made sense. It doesn't sound like the original poster would have been a domain admin.
> Large institutions will be provided supplemental storage later this year and all schools can gain additional storage through Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade.
I am always frustrated/embarrassed at Google’s messaging of these things, but it seems to me like this tweet is trying to stir the pot for attention. The Pixel phone with unlimited uploads marketed at consumers is one thing, but this unlimited plan for universities assuredly contained terms that didn’t guarantee it forever and a large institution should be aware of that. I also don’t think unlimited is a synonym for eternally unlimited.
It also seems like it would be a bad idea to store frequently accessed experimental data in Google Drive and based on follow up tweets the professor agrees and doesn’t use Google Drive for this… so it seems like they are mad about a hypothetical.
I don’t think Google is always the most thoughtful with things like this but this seems like something to take up with their IT department and not a second Google Reader incident.
Much of the marketing for drive seems to still be (in sentiment at least) about dumping it all into Google drive and never having to worry about storage again. I assume they mean storing huge files in Google drive, but actually that's probably a significant use case for many users of cloud storage.
That said, I’m struggling to imagine how you could even efficiently process on the order of 1 PiB of data from Drive. Having that in a data warehouse or some object storage close to your compute seems required to make any good use of it.
With regards to data locality, I was more thinking about running a map reduce or similar ETL pipeline.
While our actual students/staff have not abused the unlimited-ness at all, there's been a big trend in recent years for fake spam/bot type accounts to submit online applications (particularly for the inexpensive community college level here in California) which would allow for those fake people to get issued accounts within the college systems (typically giving them a student email account).
In essence though, one bad account could in turn create multiple shared drives it seems, and then from there grant access to other external Gmail accounts and swap the ownership to them, while still leaving the unlimited storage capabilities in place (at least that's been my perception of what I had seen in our instance). Before I left recently, I had seen pages upon pages of shared drives in our GSuite Admin area of Shared Drives that were terabytes large (one as high as 100 TB or some ridiculously high number like that)...with very little mitigation options being provided by Google to help avoid that from occurring in the first place (aside from taking the extreme measure of locking things down after the fact...but cleaning up that existing mess seemed to not have a solution...supposedly there were going to be some new tools released early this year to help out, but not sure if those are available yet).
Suffice to say...some bad apples are making it hard for all of the good people to take advantage of what was otherwise a wonderful offering for educational institutions (having administered many systems over the years...it's always nicer to not have to worry about license limits and other baloney like that since it simplifies things for what is usually an already overloaded IT staff).
I could clearly see all of the bad accounts abusing our instance...if only there was an easy way to filter all accounts > 2 TB and then delete them I could have reduced our storage usage down considerably for Google.
That multiplied by hundreds of institutions where this may have occurred during the pandemic and I can see how storage usage could have went up dramatically on Google's end...but I think that Admins in those institutions would be more than happy to clean things up if they had the tools/ability to do so.
Interested to hear on which products Google makes any promises regarding lifetime (ie. guaranteeing at least 10 years availability for example).
Back a few years ago when I was in grad school (University of Texas) they went all in telling everyone to use Google Drive for everything because we were getting unlimited storage for life. Last week they just sent out an email saying that as of later this year our quotas are going to be 1GB.
RIP huge swaths of research data I guess.
> As of November 2021, UTmail is utilizing over 6.4 PB of pooled storage. However, due to a change in the G Suite storage policy, Google will implement a 545 TB pooled storage quota.
> Of the customers impacted: 70,000 are students, faculty, and staff, and 200,000 are alumni and retirees.
Edit: just read the help files closer and turns out that alumni and retirees lose Google Drive entirely -- 1GB is just for email.
O.o I guess I never really think about the scale these systems operate at.
Actually, considering that, the fact they give you 15GB on a free consumer account must add up to at least many hundreds of PBs?! I guess storage is cheap and/or targeted ads make a lot of money!
This is happening to all universities that used Google to provide email and drive space for students and faculty. For the University of Texas alone, there are approximately 270,000 affected accounts. I personally have 895 GB in my Drive. Will you seed it for me?
The storage now being limited is for Gsuite- Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
These aren't the products you'd store a lab's datasets in. They simply aren't designed for that and won't provide acceptable APIs, performance, etc. Thus although this change may stink for university IT, I don't see an alternate world where this lab had embraced Gsuite storage and was crippled by it.
You name the technology, I've seen it be used to store results. If a system is centrally funded by the main university (and not the lab itself), researchers will find a way to get it to hold research data if it has an interface to ingest a file...
They don't need acceptable APIs or performance - they need something as opposed to nothing, and they'll find a way to make it work! More to the point, they need basic IT infrastructure funded by something central in the university. If there was a centrally funded way to use s3 with glacier for archival, (so they don't need to spend lab money on it forever more), many would use it.
In my experience, often the issue is a lack of local budget, meaning infinite ingenuity to find a way to use what is available to get the best outcome for their research. Any ability to upload and store a file for later retrieval can, with enough low-cost RA time, be made into a apparently infinite free storage system!
I’m I’ll move a copy somewhere else if I ever need to conduct new research on it, but I’m sure if I had gone on to take a phd each paper, published or not would end up in a folder on gdrive if google had promised me the space.
Absolutely with all the small players.
But even the big players as we see here.
Of course that seemed wrong because if you are uploading for years $5 a month isn't going to keep covering all of that storage. I imagine that part of this assumption that storage costs would keep dropping and presumably this isn't happening as quickly as originally predicted.
It seems that in the context of research universities there may be a mismatch in communication and use of "unlimited". Google said something it didn't mean, then eventually realises and claws it back.
This has happened twice in a few weeks - once for "forever" on free G Suite, and now with "unlimited" for universities.
I'm surprised that they don't get more marketing collateral for selling the credibility of G Suite to enterprise clients from being able to talk about case studies like storing and processing multi dimensional time-series medical imaging data on their storage platform as a way to say "we're ready for your data, and you can feel good while you pay us, as we support this great research"...
Clearly the revenue push has arrived for these services. 100 TB per institution isn't really a lot when you consider research data, but might be more tenable if you consider purely students with the odd slideshow and video. Unfortunately this makes life easier for the less scientifically rigorous fields of study that make a few slide decks, rather than the ones where a student might collect a few TB of data in an hour or two.
Zero.
Not even the owners watching them to make sure they uploaded correctly.
I think you are limited to 12 hours / 250 GB per clip?
The bandwidth / storage demands of video are not insignificant.
Someday someone will do something - ie, insure you are paying for some kind of service.
Not just G Suite. Google Photos + Pixel unlimited storage[0], along with Google Photos free storage[1].
[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/01/31/pixel-3-google-photos-back...
Why is Google cutting back so much?
I thought storage was cheap. How much have they overextended themselves?
It was so wildly predictable, yet every time I went to our businesspeople they claimed without irony that there would be “unlimited storage” and that “it’s not a problem”. Didn’t tolerate dissent. I eventually ended up leaving and claiming that it was a finite universe.
Now they are locked in hard, and trying to figure out how to keep the number of seats they paid for by removing accounts. No policy from the beginning on that, so they are having issues.
So predictable.
If you have a couple of very large folders (even 1 TB or more) you care about holding onto from your unlimited drive, share it with a few (even throwaway) personal Gmail accounts. Once my HS disabled access to my account after I graduated, the school admin account somehow inherited these folders (the organization name is the new owner).
I still have access to these many TB large folders many years on in the “Shared with me” section of gdrive.
1) There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything with technology. Either you haven't read the fine print of your provider's terms or your provider will at some point have to change them.
2) What's interesting is that storage costs are dropping precipitously while they're restricting their customer's use of storage space. I just bought an 18 TB SATA drive for my main desktop that I paid $320 for. 100 TB just isn't that much space today.
I think one of the big issues is the performance of the disk. At 200 MB/s (which is generous for a spinning disk) it would take more than 24 hours to read all the data from the disk.
With those kind of performance characteristics, I suspect that it makes redundancy and checking for integrity much more complicated.
I think it's less about storage quantity now, and more about the available bandwidth for access to that storage, if we assume 100 TB is reasonable for a whole university. If we assume parallel reads from all 8 drives at, say, 200 MB/s (which is likely optimistic and assumes one single linear workload), this will only get you 12 Gbps.
Throw multiple users and a need to seek, and rapidly the cost seems to be to become random access, latency and bandwidth (SSD caching in a tiered architecture etc).
This might help Google justify higher pricing for storage than the "raw" storage cost, if the market will bear it. Alternatively, maybe the solution is for Google to badge up a non Google Drive storage service in the education workspace suite for research data, based on more appropriate cloud storage offerings with glacier type tiers etc? Offer universities unlimited storage and people will find incredible things to store there you never dreamed of....
That would also bring into question if "significant" content creators would have more leverage to upload more videos than the average user. Then all the people that expect to be able to upload unlimited videos would either move off to a competitor, condition themselves to think otherwise, or something else.
Since universities need to provide email and storage services to their students anyway, Google is realizing that they will happily pay the bill rather than switching providers.
Is Google in trouble?
It's like decision makers don't understand business and human psychology.
Firstly, when you tell someone they have "unlimited" space, it will be filled up with "unlimited" data. Its basically a law.
Secondly, since the dawn of the concept of transactions between people and businesses, everyone knows there is "no free lunch". I just don't get why enterprise environments allow "unlimited" and "perpetual license" and other weasel terms into their contracts.
Understand that no business will give anything away for free. Be extra careful when a business says so.
The tweet talks about 500TB. That's $30kpa with Backblaze B2, $126kpa on S3 before any data movement. It's £10k in raw drives without any redundancy. Unless the "unlimited" plan is $50kpa there's no way that would ever be viable for a business to take on indefinitely.
Yes, it's deeply irresponsible for Google to make promises (they know more than most how much free services get abused), but customers have to be aware too.
Any org with decent IT need to think of business continuity. They need to plan for the risk of a discontinued product or a bankrupt supplier. If the (implicit or explicit) plan is "we accept the risk", then don't blame the supplier.
We offer platform as a service, and are regularly asked for exit plans from our customers. In brief, if we discontinue our platform you will need to do X, which will cost you Y.
What are the best options for deduplication and organization if I have to do it at once?
I'd download a Google Takeout.
If you need something to deduplicate your takeout, feel free to try PhotoStructure (I'm the author). https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/
(You'll be left with a single datestamped-based folder hierarchy: just enable "automatic organization". The folder format is customizable, too: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/how-to-change-the-naming-... )
Like a written contract or this University just assumed there was unlimited Google storage?