Posted On: Jul 19, 2021
Today AWS announced general availability of io2 Block Express volumes that deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, and are designed to deliver sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block Express refers to io2 volumes running on the EBS Block Express architecture, and supports standard io2 features such as Multi-Attach and Elastic Volumes. io2 Block Express volumes are available first with Amazon EC2 R5b instances, which delivers the highest EBS-optimized performance, with support for other instances coming soon. Using R5b instances customers can now provision a single io2 volume with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4000 MB/s of throughput, and storage capacity of 64 TiB. This makes io2 Block Express and R5b instance combination ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, and mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.
R5b instances are well-suited to run business-critical and storage-intensive applications as they offer the highest EBS-optimized performance of up to 260,000 IOPS and 7,500 MB/s throughput. Customers have historically relied on on-premises Storage Area Networks, or SANs for delivering high-performance and high-durability block storage. However, SANs are often expensive, force upfront investment regardless of your utilization, and are difficult to manage. With io2 Block Express volumes, customers now get SAN-like performance in a 5 9’s durable block store. This enables customers to simply lift-and-shift their business-critical applications to the cloud and benefit from the ability to instantly scale, provision, and pay for just the capacity and performance that they need.
io2 Block Express volumes are available in all regions where R5b is available. These include US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt), with support for more regions coming soon.
Customers can get started with io2 volumes that run on Block Express using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. Any io2 volume that customers creates with or attaches to R5b instances will be an io2 Block Express volume. For more information, please see the io2 Block Express announcement on the AWS News blog and product overview page.