Earlier this year, Google Cloud launched Hyperdisk Storage Pools with Advanced Capacity to simplify management and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for block storage. Today, we’re extending that innovation to performance with Hyperdisk Storage Pools featuring Advanced Performance. This allows you to provision IOPS and throughput in aggregate, dynamically allocating resources based on application needs, enhancing utilization, and streamlining performance management.

You can start using Advanced Performance Storage Pools in the Google Cloud console today. Learn more about Hyperdisk block storage solutions from Google Cloud here.

The Challenge: Optimizing Block Storage Performance

Google Cloud customers have expressed difficulty in balancing the full utilization of block storage performance resources while ensuring their workloads have the necessary performance to succeed. This challenge, often referred to as the “sum of peaks” problem, arises when customers provision their block storage for the maximum performance they’ve observed, even though their disks typically consume far less. As a result, disks often operate at chronically low performance utilization. The visualization below illustrates this phenomenon.

Photo Credit: Google Cloud

Reduce TCO by 40-50% with Advanced Performance Storage Pools

Google Cloud developed Advanced Performance for Hyperdisk Storage Pools to address this challenge. With Advanced Performance Storage Pools, customers no longer need to choose between ensuring workload success and maximizing performance utilization. By provisioning performance in aggregate, the Storage Pool intelligently allocates resources across disks as needed, without altering disk behavior, allowing applications to run seamlessly. This simplifies performance planning and helps lower TCO, all while maintaining both application performance and resource efficiency.

Consider two examples to see how Hyperdisk Storage Pools with Advanced Performance can reduce TCO. First, an enterprise application suite requires 25K IOPS at peak (e.g., during simultaneous user logins) but only 10K at steady state. Second, a database workload needs 75K IOPS at peak (e.g., during quarterly report generation) but only 35K at steady state. Without a Pool, these workloads would typically operate at 40-45% utilization, since steady-state performance is about half of what was provisioned. However, with Hyperdisk Storage Pools and dynamic resource allocation, these workloads achieve approximately 80% utilization, enabling customers to provision fewer performance resources and reduce TCO by 40-55%—all without modifying their workloads.

Streamline Block Storage Performance Planning

Google Cloud's Advanced Performance Storage Pools introduce a groundbreaking approach to provisioning performance resources. Traditionally, infrastructure managers had to choose between optimizing for performance, which often led to low utilization, or optimizing for efficiency, which could risk application failures. This required constant management of each volume’s performance, leading to significant operational burden.

With Hyperdisk Advanced Performance Storage Pools, managing block storage performance becomes much simpler. In these Pools, Disk IOPS and Throughput are “thin-provisioned,” meaning that provisioning performance at the disk level doesn’t immediately consume resources. You can allocate up to 5x the IOPS and throughput within the Pool to the disks, making it easier to plan deployments without having to predict each disk’s exact performance needs. This also boosts efficiency by removing the need for manual management of IOPS and Throughput allocation. Now, you can create disks with the highest potential performance and let the Pool dynamically allocate resources when required.

Early adopters, like REWE, have already experienced the benefits of this solution.

“At REWE, it’s a huge pain point for us to have to predict the performance spikes of our applications when planning deployments, and it’s even harder to actively manage performance utilization of storage resources. With Advanced Performance Storage Pools, we can stop worrying about both. We are excited about the savings in TCO, and toil, that Advanced Performance Pools will bring to our infrastructure.” – Jan Rundshagen, Infrastructure Manager, REWE

Get started with Hyperdisk Advanced Performance Storage Pools

To begin using Hyperdisk Advanced Performance Storage Pools, follow the same workflow as when creating regular Hyperdisk Storage Pools. Log into the Google Cloud console, navigate to Compute Engine, and locate the Storage section. From there, create your Storage Pool, choose the volume type (Balanced or Throughput), select Advanced Performance, and set the total capacity and performance needed for the pool. You can start by creating new Hyperdisk volumes within the pool, which not only share capacity but also dynamically share performance across your resources.

Google Cloud aims to transform the way you manage and optimize performance efficiency for your applications with Advanced Performance Storage Pools. This feature is being rolled out to regions and zones now. Get started today in the Google Cloud console or explore documentation for more details on how to create, use, and manage Advanced Performance Storage Pools.

Source: Google Cloud

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