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Amazon expands Elastic Block Storage

As we know Elastic Block Store (EBS) is the block level storage that increases the durability and persistence of data for EC2 instances. It earlier provided storage size from 1GB up to 1TB.

Last week, Amazon announced increased size and IOPS for EBS. Larger and faster volumes of up to 16TB are available now in all commercial AWS regions and in AWS GovCloud (US). Also, SSD EBS volumes now get 99.999% availability. Before this release, EBS just mentioned 10x durability compared to normal harddrive, but nothing on availability.

Before this release, applications that required storage capacity of more than 1TB used multiple EBS volumes attached to an instance, and various striping techniques like software RAID 0 and RAID 5 to combine those volumes into a single logical drive. In Linux, LVM was used to combine multiple EBS volumes into one logical volume.

There were multiple issues with EBS volume striping:

The newly improved EBS volumes can overcome these issues. EBS volumes are available in three different flavours and following are the updates for each:

ebs1

ebs2

ebs3

You can now have higher capacity volume without striping smaller volumes. Both SSD volume types are designed to provide five 9s (99.999%) of availability and up to 320 megabytes per second of throughput when attached to EBS optimized instances. The throughput of an EBS volume is directly proportional to the size. Volumes smaller than 1 TB can burst beyond their baseline IOPS to deliver up to 3,000 IOPS while volumes larger than 1 TB can have a baseline of up to 10,000 IOPS.

If you want to increase the size of your existing volumes to take advantage of this new feature release, you can resize your current volumes using our previous blog post here.

If you have any questions, ask them at the bottom and I will try to get them answered.

WRITTEN BY CloudThat

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Comments

  1. Ravi Sutrave

    Apr 28, 2015

    Reply

    Hi Janki, Great Job for writing this piece. Very clear and Crisp. This was one of the best explanations I have ever read. Keep it up. You will be a great blogler!

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