AWS Announces SSD-Backed Volume Type for Amazon EBS 

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) today announced the availability of a new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that delivers high-performance storage at a low cost. Designed for five nines of availability, General Purpose (SSD) volumes are engineered to provide predictable performance for a broad range of workloads, including personal productivity, small to medium-sized databases, test and development environments, and boot volumes. General Purpose (SSD) volumes providethe ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte.

Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types to best meet the needs of their workloads: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes. The General Purpose (SSD) volumes introduced today are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need. Magnetic volumes, formerly known as Standard volumes, provide the lowest cost per gigabyte of all Amazon EBS volume types and are ideal for workloads where data is accessed less often and the absolute lowest storage cost is paramount.

“Customers have been using Amazon EBS since 2008 to run their most demanding applications and databases on AWS. We continue to iterate on the service to support the evolving needs of our customers,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President, Compute at Amazon Web Services. “In 2012, we introduced Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, providing customers with access to SSD technology for their most demanding workloads. With the introduction of EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes today, SSD technology can now be applied to a much broader range of use cases at a lower cost while also delivering high IOPS, low latency, and high bandwidth.”