Maureen O'Gara

Google's got Amazon Web Services and Rackspace / OpenStack in its sights.

It's upgrading its young Infrastructure-as-a-Service Compute Engine, still in preview, and piling on 36 new types of server configurations with different virtual cores, memory and disk types, up from the four basic instances it had at introduction in June.

They include high-memory and high-CPU instances as well as a lower-cost diskless file configuration for applications that don't need a dedicated disk attached to their server.

Google, which is reputedly "blazingly fast" compared to Amazon, also cut prices on its four main instances by around 5% and its standard storage by around 20%.

Google's initial entry-level virtual server worth 3.75GB of RAM and 420GB of disk was priced at $0.145 an hour. It's now $0.138 an hour while cloud storage that was 12 cents for the first terabyte is now $0.095 a terabyte.

It's also got a limited preview of an S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage- or Glacier-like Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage for developers that cuts the cost of storing data at the expense of lower availability and will be adding Persistent Disk Snapshotting for backing up persistently stored data that will be moved to other Google data centers to create globally available applications. The snapshot can start up a new VM.

Pricing for DRA starts at seven cents a gigabyte a month for the first terabyte and decreases for those who need more.

Apparently Google, like Amazon, is reportedly attracting Silicon Valley start-ups and established concerns the want to build new cloud apps.

Figure availability in the next few weeks if the widgetry actually leaves beta.