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Google has added a new U.S. region for several of its Cloud Platform Services.
The new region, dubbed us-east, will be hosted out of Google’s data center in Berkeley County, S.C., and is designed to improve cloud latency times and performance for customers on the East Coast.
Google will use the data center to host its Google Compute Engine infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, Google Cloud SQL hosted database and Google Cloud Storage services.
Google App Engine will come to the data center soon, Google Senior Product Manager Jay Judikowitz said in a blog post without elaborating on when that is likely to happen.
The new us-east region will reduce network latency for Google customers on the East Coast while also giving Google business customers in North America a way to implement a multiregion disaster recovery capability for applications running on Google Cloud.
Google Oct. 1 also announced general availability of what it described as four new cloud storage buckets. In Google parlance, a bucket is where cloud customers store their data. When setting up one, customers have to specify a unique name for their bucket, the storage class they want and where the bucket should be located.
With Thursday’s announcement, Google customers have four more regions where they can put their storage buckets. Two of them, in South Carolina and Iowa, are located in the United States, while the other two are located overseas in Taiwan and Belgium. Google’s cloud customers can use the new regional storage centers for standard, nearline and durable reduced availability data storage, Judikowitz said.
The goal is to give enterprises the option of locating storage buckets close to their Google Compute Engine instances, he added.
Google currently operates 14 data centers around the world, so it is relatively easy for the company to deliver its cloud platform services from locations close to its customers. Six of the data centers are located in the Americas, including one in Quilicura, Chile. The company maintains two data centers in Asia and four in Asia.
Google is in the process of building a data center at the site of an old coal power plant in Alabama’s Jackson County. The $600 million data center will reuse a lot of the existing infrastructure at the plant, including its electric transmission lines and utility infrastructure. The company is working with the Tennessee Valley Authority to explore ways of bringing renewable energy to the plant.
Google has said that it wants its data centers and facilities around the world to be powered entirely by renewable energy. The company has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to turn that vision into reality.
Earlier this year, for instance, Google entered into a long-term agreement with NextEra Energy Resources to bring wind energy to its North Bayshore headquarters in California. The agreement calls on NextEra to install several new wind turbines at its wind farm in California that will generate some 43 megawatts of electricity starting next year.
Similarly, Google has committed to buying the entire output for the next 10 years of a new wind farm near Eemshaven, Netherlands, to power a brand-new $700 million data center there. In addition to its commitment to renewable energy sources, Google has said it plans to take advantage of natural resources where it can for heating and cooling its data center facilities.