AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, delivering SAN capabilities in the cloud for the first time. EBS Block Express is a next-generation storage server architecture that provides the highest block storage performance without the cost or hassle of having to procure, scale, and maintain expensive on-premises SANs.

With io2 volumes running on Block Express, customers can achieve sub-millisecond latency and provision a single io2 volume with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity—a 4x increase in performance, throughput, and capacity for existing io2 volumes.

Moreover, io2 Block Express volumes are claimed to be ideal for the largest, most I/O-intensive, mission-critical deployments of Oracle databases, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, InterSystems database, and SAS Analytics.

EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now generally available with many important SAN features, including Multi-Attach and Elastic Volumes. In the coming months, support for additional SAN features, including Fast Snapshot Restore, will be added.

io2 Block Express volumes are available with R5b instances, the Amazon EC2 instance with the highest EBS bandwidth, in all regions where AWS offers R5b instances today: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt). In the coming months, support for additional EC2 instance types and regions will be added.