AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EBS io2 Volume

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc., (AWS) 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. To get started with io2 volumes visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs.

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.”

Customers can create new io2 volumes with just a few clicks using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, or AWS SDKs. io2 volumes are available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Middle East (Bahrain), with more regions coming soon.

Bristol Myers Squibb is a global biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases. “We love the performance benefits of io1 and use it for simulations that require high storage performance,” said Mohammad Shaikh, Director, Scientific Computing Services, Cloud Computing & DevOps, at Bristol Myers Squibb. “However, we need to provision more storage to meet the IOPS requirements, adding to our cost. But with the 10x increase in IOPS per GB ratio, we can easily enable peak performance at a much lower cost than we ever could with traditional SAN hardware vendors.”

Salesforce enables companies of every size and industry to take advantage of powerful technologies-cloud, mobile, social, internet of things, artificial intelligence, voice, and blockchain-to create a 360° view of their customers. “Our commitment to our core value of customer success includes ensuring Salesforce applications are available whenever our customers need them,” said Paul Constantinides, Executive Vice President of Engineering, at Salesforce. “Delivering an always-on experience requires highly reliable storage. With AWS and EBS new io2 volumes designed for five nines durability, we will continue to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

Cloudreach, a Blackstone portfolio company, specializes in implementing and managing public cloud solutions for enterprise customers across Europe and North America. “Cloudreach has been using AWS for over a decade, and we love the incredible innovation shown by Amazon EBS in terms of feature releases and the ability to act on customer requests. The impact of downtime for our customers is high, and io1 volumes have been great in minimizing these risks. We rely on AWS’ Multi-AZ architecture to keep our platforms running 24×7, but with increased volume durability we can further improve our application uptime,” said Chris Bunch, GM for the AWS Practice at Cloudreach. “io2 is awesome for us, because the 100x higher volume durability further reduces the risk of downtime, and the new IOPS to GB ratio means we’re actually paying less for performance per GB.”

Rapid7 is a leading provider of cloud security analytics and automation. “Historically, we’ve used EBS gp2 volumes to deliver block storage at low cost for our Product Analytics platform, which analyzes customer behavior to help us make more intelligent product decisions and innovate faster. As our customer base has grown, we have started relying more and more on the availability of this platform to guide our strategic decisions. So, higher volume durability is critical for minimizing any downtime,” said Ulrich Dangel, Principal Infrastructure Architect, at Rapid7. “We love that in addition to gp2 volumes for our general purpose storage for EC2 instance, we now have the option of using io2 volumes for our highest performance applications, which have helped us increase our data durability by 100x without redesigning the platform.”