In a bid to capture more cloud customers, Google has reduced prices on its existing virtual servers by 5% and added 36 selections to the four previously available in its Compute Engine server catalog.

Google seeks to put more muscle behind its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings since Compute Engine was first announced as “a limited preview offering” during the Google I/O 2012 show in June. It’s still in limited preview, i.e., a beta test through customers, with no date in sight for when it will become a generally available product, said Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions in the Google Enterprise unit.

But Rao added that Google is seeing heavy signup by Silicon Valley startups, who are often next door to the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex. Compute Engine has gotten good reviews on the ease and speed with which it launches a virtual server.
Network Computing