AWS quadruples per-volume maximum capacity and performance on io2 volumes. On December 1st, 2020 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. 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.
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. 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.
