Google doubles Cloud Compute local SSD capacity: Now it's 3TB per VM

Google Cloud Compute Engine customers running big databases can now attach up to 3TB of high IOPS local solid-state drive (SSD) to a single virtual machine.

The new capacity, which Google has launched in beta, doubles the previous limit of four local SSD 375GB partitions attached to each machine to eight partitions, amounting to a total of 3TB compared with the previous 1.5TB limit.

Local SSDs are physically attached to the host server and offer higher performance and lower latency storage than Google's cheaper persistent disk storage.

Google launched local SSDs last year to cater for big-data platforms such as Hadoop and NoSQL databases, offering 680,000 read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 360,000 write IOPS.

Google hasn't lowered the pricing of local SSD, which remains at 21.8 cents per gigabyte per month.

Customers who need only persistent disk can now attach up to 64TB to each VM for most machine types, according to Google.

This provision applies to standard, high-memory, high-CPU, and custom machine types that have more than 3.75GB of memory. However, as Google notes, attaching anything over 10TB per instance currently is a beta feature.

Persistent disk storage costs four cents per gigabyte per month and provides 0.75 read IOPS per gigabyte and 1.5 write IOPS per gigabyte.

Google's SSD-backed persistent disk by contrast offers delivers 30 IOPS per gigabyte provisioned, and up to 15,000 IOPS per instance.

Last year, Google and AWS cut prices numerous times in response to each other. But following the move by AWS to shave five percent off some prices at the beginning of the year, Google opted not to follow suit and instead highlighted that it is still up to 41 percent cheaper for comparable compute resources.

As usual the two companies have different ways of charging for resources, making it difficult to compare prices.

But as an example, Amazon's elastic block storage general-purpose SSD volumes cost 10 cents per GB per month, while its higher performance provisioned-IOPS SSD costs 12.5 cents per gigabyte of provisioned storage, or 6.5 cents per provisioned IOPS per month.

Its provisioned IOPS SSD provides a maximum volume size of 16TB.

Read more about Google Cloud Compute

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