Google Compute Engine Local SSD Exits Beta

Every cloud and its mother seems to be turning to solid state disks (SSDs) to provide customers and partners with a higher performance storage option on virtual machines. Google (GOOG) has now officially introduced its Local SSD option on Google Compute Engine.

Google Local SSD was really unveiled back in October, at which point it went into beta, but now the SSD option is generally available to users of Compute Engine. Kirill Tropin, a Google product manager, explained the techie bits on the Google Cloud Platform blog: “The Local SSD feature lets customers attach between 1 and 4 SSD partitions of 375 GB to any full core VM and have dedicated use of those partitions. And, it provides an extremely high number of IOPS (680k random 4K read IOPS). Unlike Persistent Disk, Local SSD doesn’t have redundancy.”

Designed mainly for highly demanding applications that provide their own replication (modern databases and Hadoop, as good examples), the Google Local SSD option is also meant for scratch space for intense computational applications. As Tropin noted in his blog post, it’s “also a great supplement for memory due to high IOPS and low price per GB.”

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Google claims its new Local SSD option is competitively priced at $0.218 per gigabyte per month. The pricing varies a bit based on how end-users are making use of the SSDs, though. When buying Local SSDs attached to virtual machines, the price is at $0.0003 per gigabyte per hour. Google noted that’s equal to $0.00048 per read-IOPS per month. Still not exactly easy to compare to the general Local SSD option and its per gigabyte per month price tag. A little more transparency would be nice.

According to Tropin, the beta release of Local SSD was well-received, both by customers and by Cloud Harmony’s benchmark study.