Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of io2 in Asia Pacific.
The next generation Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) are designed to deliver 100x higher volume durability of 99.999% compared to the previous 99.9% durability offered by io1.
“Customers rely on highly durable AWS block storage to keep their business-critical applications running at any scale,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the Vice President of Block and Object Storage at AWS.
This higher durability reduces the likelihood of storage failures and improves application availability by making primary copies of data more resilient.
“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,” added Ms. Tomsen Bukovec.
Compared to io1, customers requiring high availability of CRM and online transaction systems can drive 10x higher input/output operations per second (IOPS) to improve performance without increasing storage cost.
“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,” said Mohammad Shaikh, the Director for Scientific Computing Services, Cloud Computing and DevOps at Bristol Myers Squibb, a global biopharmaceutical company.
AWS identified that customers often provision more storage than needed to meet IOPS requirements for applications like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Splunk, Apache Cassandra, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle databases. This resulted in higher spends than customers would otherwise incur.
“Our commitment to our core value of customer success includes ensuring Salesforce applications are available whenever our customers need them,” said Paul Constantinides, the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce.
The io2 volumes are priced the same as io1 volumes, keeping the same predictable cost for EBS customers.
“The impact of downtime for our customers is high. The new IOPS to GB ratio means we’re actually paying less for performance per GB,” said Chris Bunch, the GM for AWS Practice at Cloudreach, a company specialising in implementing and managing public cloud solutions for enterprise customers across Europe and North America.
Customers can create new AWS io2 volumes or upgrade existing volumes to io2 using Elastic Volumes, which modify the volume type without any downtime for applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
“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, the Principal Infrastructure Architect at Rapid7, a leading provider of cloud security analytics and automation.
The new AWS io2 volumes are now available in Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.