Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS Volumes

Highest performance EBS volumes for your most critical applications at scale
Get started with io2 Block Express volumes

What are Provisioned IOPS volumes

Provisioned IOPS volumes, backed by solid-state drives (SSDs), are the highest performance Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage volumes designed for your critical, IOPS-intensive and throughput-intensive workloads that require low latency.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, available since 2021, are designed to deliver up to a maximum of 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/s of throughput per volume, 4x more IOPS than the general-purpose volumes. Io2 Block Express volumes are also designed to provide 100X higher durability of 99.999% as well as a 20X higher IOPS to storage ratio of 1000 IOPS for every provisioned GB – at the same price as io1. Furthermore, when attached to Nitro System-based EC2 instances, io2 Block Express volumes are designed to achieve consistent sub-millisecond latencies and deliver the provisioned performance 99.9% of the time. This makes io2 Block Express volumes ideal for performance intensive, business-critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 that will benefit from higher uptime. These volumes also support Multi-Attach with I/O fencing, which allows customers to attach an io2 Block Express volume to up to sixteen Nitro-based EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone. For applications that have less stringent performance or durability requirements, we recommend evaluating general purpose volumes.

To learn more about pricing, visit the Amazon EBS pricing page.

Benefits

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes make it easy for customers to meet the IOPS and throughput requirements of their most intensive business-critical applications, including SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Apache Cassandra. Designed to deliver a maximum of 256,000 IOPS, io2 Block Express volumes offer 4x more IOPS than our general purpose volumes. With io2 Block Express, we are pushing the boundaries on single volume performance so that customers can get SAN-like performance along with the flexibility, simplicity, and scalability of AWS.

Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available, reliable, and durable. Io2 Block Express volumes in particular are designed to provide 99.999% durability with an annual failure rate (AFR) of 0.001%, where failure refers to a complete or partial loss of the volume. This makes io2 Block Express ideal for business-critical applications that will benefit from higher uptime.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes are designed to achieve consistent sub-millisecond latencies as well as deliver the provisioned performance 99.9% of the time. Io2 Block Express delivers sub-millisecond I/O latency at higher consistency and the lowest EBS outlier latency. This is particularly beneficial for customers that want to run their low-latency OLTP workloads successfully on EBS.

Customers can enable Multi-Attach on an io2 Block Express volume to allow a volume to be concurrently attached to up to sixteen Nitro-based EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone. Multi-Attach makes it easier to achieve higher application availability for applications that manage storage consistency from multiple writers. Each attached instance has full read and write permission to the shared volume. Multi-Attach on an io2 Block Express volume supports NVMe reservations. There is no additional fee to enable Multi-Attach.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express

Customers choose io2 Block Express volumes to run their critical, performance-intensive applications. With io2 Block Express, customers can get the highest performance block storage in AWS with 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io1 volumes at no additional cost. Io2 Block Express is designed to offer up to 4,000 MB/s throughput per volume, 256,000 IOPS/volume, 64 TiB storage capacity, and 1,000 IOPS per GB, while delivering sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. This makes io2 Block Express ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.

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 for block storage at cloud scale. Block Express does this by communicating with Nitro System-based instance using Scalable Reliable Datagrams (SRD), which is implemented in the Nitro Card dedicated for EBS I/O function on the host hardware of the instance. This is the same high performance and low latency network interface that is also used for inter-instance communication in Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads. Additionally, Block Express offers modular software and hardware building blocks that can be assembled in many different ways, giving us the flexibility to design and deliver improved performance and new features at a faster rate.

You can get the maximum IOPS and throughput limits by attaching io2 Block Express to Nitro System-based EC2 instances. For more information, see io2 Block Express volumes.

Product Details

Volume Type

io2 Block Express

io1

Short Description

 Highest performance SSD volume designed for business-critical latency-sensitive transactional workloads

High performance SSD volume designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads

Durability

99.999%

 99.8% - 99.9% durability

Use Cases

Ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission-critical deployments of NoSQL and relational databases such as Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics

I/O-intensive NoSQL and relational databases

API Name

io2

 io1

Volume Size

4 GB – 64 TB

4 GB - 16 TB

Max IOPS/Volume

256,000

64,000

Max Throughput*/Volume

4,000 MB/s

1,000 MB/s

Max IOPS/Instance

420,000

 420,000

Max Throughput/Instance

12,500 MB/s

 12,500 MB/s

Price

$0.125/GB-month

$0.065/provisioned IOPS-month up to 32,000 IOPS

$0.046/provisioned IOPS-month from 32,001 to 64,000 IOPS

$0.032/provisioned IOPS-month for greater than 64,000 IOPS

$0.125/GB-month

$0.065/provisioned IOPS-month

Note: To achieve the maximum IOPS and throughput limits, the volume must be attached to a Nitro System EC2 instance.

*volume throughput is calculated as MB = 1024^2 bytes