Posted On: May 31, 2022
You can now use Elastic Volumes to dynamically increase the capacity and tune the performance of your io2 Block Express volumes with no downtime or performance impact, in the same manner as other EBS volumes. Additionally, you can now create a fully initialized io2 Block Express volume from a Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) enabled snapshot. Volumes that are created from FSR-enabled snapshots instantly deliver their provisioned performance. These features add to the capabilities of the highest-performance EBS volume type - io2 Block Express.
Launched in July 2021, io2 Block Express volumes 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 that run on the EBS Block Express architecture. You can provision a single io2 volume that delivers up to 256,000 IOPS, 4000 MB/s of throughput, and storage capacity of up to 64 TiB for running mission-critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics. With Elastic Volume support, you can dynamically increase the volume size and change the performance (IOPS), providing you greater flexibility to right-size the volume for your workload. In addition, with FSR you can get predictable performance from an io2 Block Express volume created from a snapshot without the need to initialize volumes yourself. This improved and predictable performance helps with various use cases, such as bringing up VDI environments, backup & restore, and creating test/development volume copies.
Any io2 volume that you attach to R5b instances, X2idn/X2iedn instances, and the new C7g instances always runs on Block Express. You can manage io2 volumes using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automatically create and manage FSR-enabled snapshots of your io2 Block Express volumes. io2 Block Express volumes are available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (London) regions. For more information, see the io2 Block Express product overview page.