AWS turns up the volumes

Amazon Web Services has announced general availability of io2, the next generation Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). The new io2 volume is designed for 100x higher volume durability (99.999%) when compared to the 99.9% durability offered by io1 Amazon EBS volumes. Higher volume durability reduces the likelihood of storage failures and makes the primary copy of customers’ data more resilient, resulting in better application availability. With io2, customers can drive 10x higher input/output operations per second (IOPS) from their provisioned storage at the same price as io1, so performance improves significantly without increasing storage cost. io2 is ideal for performance-intensive, business critical applications that need higher availability like ERP, CRM, and online transaction systems and the databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Apache Cassandra, MySQL, and PostreSQL that back them.

Amazon EBS already offers four different volume types at various price points and performance benchmarks to support virtually any application that customers want to run in the cloud, including relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, and big data analytics. Customers specifically choose io1 volumes (the previous highest performance EBS volumes) to run their critical, performance-intensive applications, like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Splunk, Apache Cassandra, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle databases. For these applications, customers want greater volume durability to improve the resiliency of their primary data and get better application availability. Additionally, to meet their IOPS requirements for these applications, customers often provision more storage than needed, resulting in higher spend than they would otherwise incur. For these applications, customers only want to provision and pay for the storage that they actually need.

Next-generation io2 volumes are designed to deliver 100x higher volume durability (from 99.9% to 99.999%), enhancing availability of business-critical applications. io2 volumes are priced the same as io1 volumes, keeping the same predictable cost for EBS customers, but now support 10x higher IOPS-to-storage ratio and up to 500 IOPS for every provisioned GB, so that customers can get more performance without increasing their storage spend. Similar to io1, io2 is designed to provide maximum performance of 64,000 IOPS, 1000 MB/s throughput, and single-digit millisecond latencies. Customers can create new io2 volumes or easily upgrade their existing volumes to io2 volumes using Elastic Volumes, which customers use modify the volume type without any downtime for applications running on their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

“Customers rely on highly durable AWS block storage to keep their business-critical applications running at any scale,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Block and Object Storage, AWS. “Today, we are excited to announce new high durability io2 volumes, that provide existing customers 100x higher volume durability than io1 at no additional cost. For new customers where five nines of storage durability is critical to migrate on-premises business critical applications to AWS, io2 brings together performance, durability, and agility all in a single EBS volume.”