Hyperdisk Storage Pools: Simplify block storage management and lower TCO
Ben Gitenstein
Group Product Manager, Google
At Google Cloud Next 2024 we announced the general availability of Hyperdisk Storage Pools, the first block storage offering from a hyperscale cloud provider to offer thin-provisioning, data reduction, and capacity pooling. Hyperdisk Storage Pools help you lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 30-50%, helping you achieve higher efficiency, modernize SAN-based workloads, and simplify block storage management. You can get started with Storage Pools in the Google Cloud console today. In this blog post, let’s take a look at how Hyperdisk Storage Pools work, and how to incorporate them into your environment.
Hyperdisk Storage Pools you can lower your block storage TCO in two ways. First, Hyperdisk Storage Pools leverage thin-provisioned capacity pooling to drive up to 80% capacity utilization. Instead of provisioning hundreds of volumes and only using a fraction of your purchased capacity, you can provision a single Storage Pool which will only be consumed by the data you write. Second, Hyperdisk Storage Pools leverage data reduction technologies to further lower the capacity you need to purchase up front, allowing you to provision less storage and you use more of what you buy.
Take for example a database workload with 1 PiB (1,000 TiB) of written data. Outside of a Hyperdisk Storage Pool, this workload runs at 38% utilization, and as a result requires the customer to provision 2.6 PiB of capacity (to account for the low utilization). With Hyperdisk Storage Pools, the customer can use thin-provisioning to drive 80% utilization and benefit from 22% data reduction. As a result, this workload would require almost 2.5 times less capacity than if run on other leading clouds, enabling Hyperdisk Storage Pools to lower the capacity TCO of this workload by as much as 56%.
Storage Pools are part of Google Cloud’s next-generation Hyperdisk block storage portfolio. With Hyperdisk volumes you can workload-optimize your storage by provisioning the capacity and performance you need, independently and dynamically. Storage Pools with Advanced Capacity are available for Hyperdisk Balanced and Throughput volume types. Hyperdisk Storage Pools let you share Hyperdisk capacity across the volumes in that pool, without changing how the included Hyperdisk volumes work. Once you’ve created your Storage Pool, simply provision and attach Hyperdisk volumes as normal. That’s why we call Hyperdisk Storage Pools “effortlessly efficient.”
Simplify block-storage management
The benefits of Hyperdisk Storage Pools go beyond lowering your TCO. Infrastructure managers know that workloads have a broad range of capacity and performance needs, and that because application owners often lack insight into their requirements, the needs of those applications can change significantly over time. As a result of that uncertainty, deciding how much block storage capacity and performance each workload will need can take weeks, or even months. Managing your block storage to ensure every workload has the capacity it needs can be a painful, time-consuming process — especially as your cloud adoption grows.
With the explosion of workloads like generative AI, scale-out analytics workloads such as Kafka, intelligent databases, cloud modernization initiatives, and cloud desktops, the last few years have only made these challenges worse. It became obvious to us that customers need a new approach to managing block storage in the cloud.
That’s why we built Hyperdisk Storage Pools: a radically simpler way to manage cloud block storage. With Hyperdisk Storage Pools, you can provision a pool of thin-provisioned and data-reduced capacity that is then shared across Hyperdisk volumes. Because the capacity of the pool is only consumed by written data (and the data is reduced), you no longer have to choose between efficiency and availability. Now you can provide your workloads with the capacity they need while only consuming the storage they actually use. This makes getting SAN-based workloads such as Virtual Desktops (VDI) or databases to the cloud much simpler. Instead of lengthy planning cycles, simply create a Hyperdisk Storage Pool and begin building your VDI or database workloads on a pool of shared capacity.
Early Hyperdisk Storage Pools customers such as REWE are already seeing the value of the offering.
“At REWE, block storage plays a critical role in serving applications from analytics to end-user computing. We see Hyperdisk Storage Pools as the foundation for our next-generation block storage applications. We are excited to use Hyperdisk Storage Pools to drive storage efficiency, while making storage management easier.” - Jan Rundshagen, Infrastructure Manager, REWE
Get started
You can get started with Hyperdisk Storage Pools by logging into the Google Cloud console, navigating to Compute Engine, and looking under Storage. Then create your Storage Pool, select its volume type (Balanced or Throughput), Advanced Capacity (if you want to take advantage of thin-provisioning and data reduction), and set the total amount of capacity and performance you will need in the pool. You can now begin creating new Hyperdisk volumes in the pool that share the pool’s capacity.
We think that Hyperdisk Storage Pools represent a fundamentally new approach to managing block storage in the cloud. For the first time, you no longer have to choose between efficiency and availability, or between cost and simplicity. As we look into the future, we see Hyperdisk Storage Pools as a new paradigm for cloud storage management.
Hyperdisk Storage Pools are rolling out to regions and zones now. Get started with Storage Pools in the Google Cloud console today or learn more in our documentation about how to create, use and manage your pools.
