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AWS Strengthens Its Cloud-Based Storage Offering

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express Volumes now generally available as a cloud-based Storage Area Network.

July 28, 2021, 1:08 p.m.

TL;DR

AWS, in a press release, on July 19, 2021, announced the release of a generally available version of Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, a cloud-based Storage Area Network (SAN) that would serve as a frugal, more reliable, and easily manageable alternative to costly on-premises SANS.

The service demands no upfront payment; they only have to account for the capacity used.

Key Facts

1
Unlike SANs, customers can now leverage the sub-millisecond latency that comes with the io2 volumes.
2
Amazon claims that io2 Block Express volumes are best used for I/O-intensive applications.
3
io2 Block Express volumes, for now, can only be employed in AWS regions that support R5b.
4
The new service uses a postpaid payment model

Details

History is made in Amazon's journal as its cloud division now has a storage network on its Cloud servers. Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, which first attained preview version at the re:invent 2020, embody the company's will towards removing the monopoly commanded by expensive on-premises SANs to deliver high and extensive storage performance. However, the detrimental part of the SANS is the complication and difficulty behind managing them. Amazon has earmarked the Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volume a "game-changer."

These high-speed networks of storage designed to provide access to ranging, physical data storage are used by organizations to improve applications' availability, reliability, and security.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express is an answer to unending reports about customers' experienced managing SANs and being bounded by legacy infrastructures and architecture. Volumes eliminate these problems at unimaginable latency, rated less than a millisecond. It boasts an operational speed of 256,000 input/output every second, 4000 megabytes per second throughput, with a whopping 64 terabytes capacity.

The production and release time is undoubtedly an intelligent move by Amazon, given the increasing demand for high-capacity storage in 2021. With perks that promise more comfort and less spending, unlike the SANs, the adoption index will exponentially rise, earning Amazon an appreciable cut out of over $44 billion that would be expended on SANs in 2021.

Io2 Block Express volumes are best suited for input/output-intensive applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAS Analytics, and SAP HANA. The service demands no upfront payment; they only have to account for the capacity used.

According to Amazon, customers have migrated to io2 Block Express because of its 99.999 percent availability and outstanding performance. Customers previously had to connect many io2 volumes, which caused substantial management issues.

AWS Vice President of Storage, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, earmarks volumes a game-changer; she went on to say:

Customers can scale their capacity by petabytes in minutes at as low as half the cost of a typical SAN, and AWS manages the storage with the same or better performance of many leading SAN storage products, and without the hassle of procuring, scaling and maintaining an on-premises SAN.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R5b instances use 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with a sustained turbo CPU frequency of 3.1 GHz and are memory-optimized. All AWS regions that support R5b instances have io2 Block Express volumes available. Available regions include Ohio, N. Virginia, Oregon, Singapore, Tokyo, and Frankfurt, with more to come in the near future.