Amazon Web Services announces lower-cost, SSD-backed option

Amazon Web Services, Inc. has announced the availability of a new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that delivers high-performance storage at a low cost. Designed for five nines of availability, General Purpose (SSD) volumes are engineered to provide predictable performance for a broad range of workloads, including personal productivity, small to medium-sized databases, test and development environments, and boot volumes. General Purpose (SSD) volumes provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte. Customers only pay for the storage they provision, with no additional charges for I/O (input/output), and prices start at $0.10/GB.

Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types to best meet the needs of their workloads: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes. The General Purpose (SSD) volumes introduced today are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need. Magnetic volumes, formerly known as Standard volumes, provide the lowest cost per gigabyte of all Amazon EBS volume types and are ideal for workloads where data is accessed less often and the absolute lowest storage cost is paramount.

“Customers have been using Amazon EBS since 2008 to run their most demanding applications and databases on AWS. We continue to iterate on the service to support the evolving needs of our customers,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President, Compute at Amazon Web Services. “In 2012, we introduced Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, providing customers with access to SSD technology for their most demanding workloads. With the introduction of EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes today, SSD technology can now be applied to a much broader range of use cases at a lower cost while also delivering high IOPS, low latency, and high bandwidth.”

Infor is one of the world’s leading providers of Enterprise Software, with more than 70,000 customers worldwide. “Using AWS, Infor is able to significantly reduce upfront capital expenditure for our customers and speed their time to value by quickly deploying our software in the cloud,” said Brian Rose, Senior Vice President at Infor Labs. “After experiencing high performance with Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes during the beta, we’re able to achieve higher baseline I/O performance and to support periodic spikes in the application workload that deliver a consistent experience to service the high expectations of our enterprise users.”
MongoLab is a fully managed MongoDB database service that powers over 100,000 databases worldwide. “Our business requires us to maintain databases that require many thousands of IOPS to meet our customers’ performance needs,” said Will Shulman, CEO at MongoLab. “In testing, Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes have proven that they can provide the high performance that our customers need while simultaneously offering exceptional price/performance. The burst capabilities are impressive and great for bulk data loads and exports. Once we roll these out we think that our customers will be very pleased with the improvements to throughput and latency across our product-lines.”

Acquia provides digital engagement solutions that equip businesses for success. “We are very impressed with the performance improvements we saw from the Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) storage after participating in the beta,” said Andrew Kenney, Vice President, Platform Engineering at Acquia. “With these new volume types we can greatly improve application load times and reliability and we're excited to be able to offer this option to our customers.”

Bracket Computing has developed a software-based service that re-imagines enterprise computing. “Today we use Amazon EBS Magnetic volumes for our service’s build infrastructure, but keeping pace with new technologies is key for us,” said Rob Enns, Vice President, Engineering at Bracket Computing. “So, when we were offered the opportunity to use Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes as part of the beta, we jumped at it. We're really impressed with the I/O performance. These new Amazon EBS volume types are already cutting workload runtimes by nearly half.”