Would you pay $480,000 for a single disk?!

Earlier this month, during their yearly anticipated re:Invent conference, our friends at AWS announced a new high performance SSD device lovingly named io2 block express. You can find the full documentation here. In a nutshell, this new offering claims to provide 10x more IOPS than existing offerings and, with the general io2 line, quadrupling it supported capacity, we can now provision a beefy 64TB, 256,000 IOPS sub-millisecond block storage device.

This single offering announcement was impressive enough to have Chris Mellor over at Blocks and Files call "shots fired" and announce that "Amazon takes on the SAN vendors". Having spent most of my years in the storage ecosystem, this got my attention and I decided to take a look. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of AWS and a proponent of cloud computing but we all know the magic cloud providers have promised us comes with a price tag and that is exactly what I wanted to see, how much does one of these puppies cost?!

So, please, check my math and correct me if I'm wrong but for a 40TB drive running at full speed, we would be charged a whopping $13,312 a month, just for this single drive?! This translates into just shy of $480,000 in 3 years of running this single device? That kinda cash could buy you a very nice SAN system for Christmas and I'll tell you what, you would get much more than 256K IOPS and 40TB of Net Capacity. Not to mention that most, if not all, SAN systems you can buy these days would offer you increased orders of magnitude availability than a single EBS disk, free, zero capacity zero performance-impact snapshots to protect your data, that are also much faster to create and use. Also, having a SAN, you will not be limited to a single device, you would be able to curve out as many LUNs (yes, I said it, LUNs!) as you'd like.

Now, I know what some are you are thinking, something along the lines of "But, Nir, we don't have a data-center anymore to run such a SAN in" and to that I can happily respond with an invitation to talk to me or any of my colleagues at Silk so that we can tell you all about our Silk Cloud Data Platform which could help you run your SQL, MySQL, Oracle and the rest of the high performance database gang at even higher speeds, for a much better price, on any cloud, inside your own cloud VPC/VNet, under your management and protection, and also provide you with all of the great features that have become table-stakes for a modern SAN system but are still in their infancy in the cloud.

P.S. we can also help with other, less traditional databases such as Elastic, Mongo and Aerospike, you just have to ask!