Amazon Web Services Inc. is looking to simplify its block storage offerings.

The company announced the general availability of Amazon EBC io2 Block Express volumes today, bringing storage area network capabilities to its cloud for the first time.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express was first previewed at re:Invent 2020 and is part of a bigger drive by the cloud company to make mission-critical storage and database migration to the cloud easier. AWS Vice President of Storage Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec explained that for decades, enterprises that want to get the highest storage performance for throughput-intensive workloads have been forced to use on-premises SAN. But the problem with that is it’s complicated and difficult to manage.

Bukovec called the volumes a game changer. “Customers can scale their capacity by petabytes in minutes at as low as half the cost of a typical SAN, and the storage is managed by AWS with the same or better performance of many leading SAN storage products, and without the hassle of procuring, scaling and maintaining an on-premises SAN,” she said.

SANs are specialized, high-speed networks of storage that provide access to consolidated, block-level data storage. They are typically composed of hosts, switches, storage elements and devices that are interconnected though a range of technologies, topologies and protocols. Enterprises use them for several reasons, including improving application availability, enhancing application performance, increasing storage performance and improving data protection and security.

Bukovec said Amazon came up with EBS io2 Block Express because of problems customers were having managing SANs and being locked into legacy infrastructures and architectures. It eliminates those problems, delivering submillisecond latency with volumes that can be provisioned with up to 256,000 input/output operations per second, 4,000 megabytes per second throughput and 64 terabytes capacity.

Conveniently, while solving customers’ problems, EBS io2 also gives Amazon a chance to grab some of the $44.4 billion that International Data Corp. says enterprises will spend on SANs in 2021.

Io2 Block Express volumes can handle workloads including Oracle databases, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server and SAS Analytics, Amazon said. The benefit is customers pay only for the storage capacity they use, without the upfront investment. One reference customer, Amway Corp., said it is using io2 Block Express to run an Oracle database application that needs exceptionally high performance during peak end-of-month processing windows.

“It’s currently running on dedicated compute, network and VMAX storage, where transaction throughput depends on extremely low write latency,” said Lee Beyer, a technical lead at Amway. “A complete re-architecture is not possible for us, but we want to be able to take advantage of scalable infrastructure during peak processing windows and enable global deployments. With the performance of io2 Block Express volumes, we expect to meet our transaction throughput and write latency requirements, allowing us to take advantage of a more elastic scalable infrastructure, setting the stage for future modernization on cloud native services.”

Amazon said customers have switched to io2 Block Express because of the 99.999% availability it offers, plus its high performance. Previously, customers had to string together multiple io2 volumes, creating some major management headaches.

In a blog post, Amazon Principal Developer Advocate Channy Yun said EBS io2 Block Express can beat or match the performance of other SAN storage products at less than half the cost. He also pointed to specialized SAN features such as Multi-Attache and Elastic Volumes, with additional features set to become available in the coming months.

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Steve McDowell told SiliconANGLE that Amazon is making some very good performance and availability guarantees with the io2 Block Express volumes, comparable with what can be had on-premises from traditional storage vendors. He added that the new offering also provides some useful tools that make it possible to proportionally scale storage, resolving one of the biggest issues with the existing io2 offering.

“This is a nice feature, and one that can only really be offered by the cloud provider itself,” McDowell said. “It’s not possible with third-party software. Amazon is attempting to remove friction from applications that require predictable and scalable storage.”

The analyst said Amazon is unlikely to provide much of a threat to legacy, on-premises SAN providers. However, he said the offering does make the public cloud a more attractive option for applications that might already benefit from moving there. “It takes away the concerns of moving some storage-sensitive workloads to the cloud, such as high-performance databases, SAP HANA and the like,” he explained.

Amazon said io2 Block Express volumes are available now in all regions where the Amazon EC2 R5b instances are on offer. The R5b instances provide the best network-attached storage performance available on EC2, Yun said. Available regions include US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt), with more to come in the future.

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