Today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) announced that io2 Block Express volumes are available on all EC2 instances built on the Nitro system. All new io2 volumes used with EC2 Nitro instances will automatically benefit from the latest generation of EBS storage server architecture designed to deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. With a single io2 Block Express volume, customers can achieve 256,000 IOPS, 4GB/s of throughput, and storage capacity of 64 TiB. io2 Block Express has the lowest p99.9 I/O latency and the best outlier latency control among major cloud providers, making it the ideal choice for the most I/O-intensive, mission-critical deployments of SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2.

Customers who are still using io1 volumes can upgrade to io2 Block Express without any downtime using the ModifyVolume API to achieve 100x durability and consistent sub-millisecond latency. With io2 Block Express, customers can drive 20x more IOPS from their provisioned storage (up to 1,000 IOPS per GB) at the same price as io1, so performance improves significantly without increasing storage cost.

io2 Block Express volumes are available in sixteen AWS Regions. Customers can create and manage io2 Block Express volumes using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. For a full list of EC2 instances that now offer io2 Block Express volumes, see the EC2 Nitro page. For more information on io2 Block Express, see our product overview page.