AWS quadruples per-volume maximum capacity and performance on io2 volumes (in preview)

Posted on: Dec 1, 2020

Today AWS announced availability, in preview, of io2 Block Express volumes that are designed to deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, while also delivering sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block express refers to io2 volumes running on EBS Block Express architecture. EBS Block Express is the next generation of Amazon EBS storage server architecture purpose-built to deliver the highest levels of performance with sub-millisecond latency. Designed to provide up to 4,000 MB/s throughput , 256,000 IOPS, 64 TiB storage capacity, and 1,000 IOPS/GB per volume, io2 Block Express offers the highest performance block storage in the cloud. This makes io2 Block Express ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.  

Customers choose io2 volumes to run their critical, performance-intensive applications like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgresSQL, and Oracle databases because they provide 99.999% (five 9s) of durability and 4x more IOPS than general purpose EBS volumes. Some applications require higher IOPS, throughput, or capacity than offered by a single io2 volume. To meet these performance needs, customers often stripe multiple io2 volumes together adding cost and complexity. Some customers also have historically had to rely on on-premises Storage Area Networks, or SANs for delivering high-performance block storage, but SANs are often expensive, force you to pay upfront CAPEX regardless of your utilization, and are difficult to manage. With io2 Block Express, customers now get SAN-like performance in a single, high durability block store in the cloud with the ability to scale, provision, and pay for just the capacity they need.  

io2 Block Express is available in preview first with R5b instances, which deliver the highest EBS-optimized IOPS of 260,000 IOPS and bandwidth of 7,500 MB/s, with support for other Nitro System-based instances coming soon. You can request access for io2 Block Express. Once access is approved, any new io2 volumes that you create in your account for the region(s) that you selected will run on EBS Block Express. Io2 Block Express is available in 6 regions – US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt), with support for other regions coming soon. For more information, please see the io2 Block Express announcement on the AWS News blog and product overview page.