About Hyperdisk Extreme

This document describes the features and performance limits of Hyperdisk Extreme volumes. Hyperdisk Extreme is designed for applications that require more than 160,000 IOPS or 2,400 MiB/s of bandwidth from a single volume, such as high-performance databases.

You can specify up to 350,000 IOPS for a single Hyperdisk Extreme volume. You can't provision a throughput level for Hyperdisk Extreme volumes. Each volume gets 250 MiB/s of throughput with every 1,000 IOPS, up to 5,000 MiB/s.

Hyperdisk Extreme volumes are designed for sub-millisecond latencies.

Use cases

Hyperdisk Extreme is a good fit for the following use cases:

• SAP HANA
• High-end SQL Server, Oracle
• In-memory RDBMS that require more than 160,000 IOPS

Machine series support

You can use Hyperdisk Extreme with the following machine series:

• C4
• C4A
• C4D
• C3
• C3D
• N2
• Z3
• X4
• M4
• M3
• M2
• M1
• A4X
• A4
• A3 (H200)
• A3 (H100)
• G4

Restrictions for machine series support

• A3 machine types require at least 4 GPUs.
• C3 machine type require at least 88 vCPUs.
• C3D machine types require at least 60 vCPUs.
• C4 machine types require at least 96 vCPUs.
• G4 machine types require at least 96 vCPUs.
• M1 machine types require at least 80 vCPUs.
• C4A, C4D, and M3 machine types require at least 64 vCPUs.
• M4 machine types require at least 112 vCPUs.

About provisioned performance

You don't have to provision performance when you create Hyperdisk volumes. If you don't provision performance, Compute Engine creates the volume with default values that you can modify later. For details about default values, see Default IOPS and throughput values .

You can specify an IOPS limits for a Hyperdisk Extreme volume when you create the volume, and you can modify the provisioned IOPS after you create the volume. You can't specify an IOPS level if you don't specify a size.

For details about performance for Hyperdisk volumes, see About Hyperdisk performance .

Size and performance limits

The following limits apply to the size, throughput, and IOPS values you can specify for a Hyperdisk Extreme volume.

• Size: between 64 GiB and 64 TiB. The default size is 1 TiB.
• IOPS: between 128 and 350,000 IOPS. However, for volumes less than 1 TiB, the range of IOPS values you can specify varies by size. For examples, see Limits for provisioned IOPS .
• Throughput: you can't specify a throughput limit for Hyperdisk Extreme volumes. Instead, the throughput depends on the provisioned IOPS. Each Hyperdisk Extreme volume is provisioned with 250 MiB/s of throughput for every 1,000 IOPS, up to a maximum of 5,000 MiB/s.

Limits for provisioned IOPS

The IOPS level you can specify for a Hyperdisk Extreme volume depends on the disk's size, according to the following formulas, where x is the volume's size in GiB.

• Minimum IOPS: 2x
• Maximum IOPS:
  • 64 GiB to 291 GiB: 1,200x
  • 292 GiB to 64 TiB: 350,000 IOPS

This table provides the range of IOPS values that you can provision for common volume sizes. If a size value isn't listed, use the preceding formula to calculate the maximum allowable IOPS.

Default size, IOPS, and throughput values

If you don't specify a size or IOPS value when you create a Hyperdisk Extreme volume, Compute Engine provisions the volume with default values.

The default size is 1 TiB.

The default IOPS and throughput are based on the following formulas.

• Default IOPS: 100,000 IOPS if you don't specify a size. Otherwise, 100x , where x is the volume's size in GiB.
• Default throughput: 5,000 MiB/s if you don't specify an IOPS value. Otherwise, 250 MiB/s per 1,000 IOPS, up to 5,000 MiB/s.

Change the provisioned IOPS or size

You can change the provisioned performance and size of a Hyperdisk Extreme volume at most once every 4 hours. For instructions on modifying size or performance, see Modify a Hyperdisk volume .

Performance limits when attached to an instance

This section lists the specific performance limits for each machine type that supports Hyperdisk Extreme. You can specify up to 350,000 IOPS for a single Hyperdisk Extreme volume. You can't provision a throughput level for Hyperdisk Extreme volumes. Each volume gets 250 MiB/s of throughput with every 1,000 IOPS, up to 5,000 MiB/s.

This section lists the maximum performance that Hyperdisk Extreme volumes can achieve for each supported instance. A Hyperdisk Extreme volume's performance when it's attached to an instance can't exceed the limits for the instance's machine type. The performance limits are also shared across all Hyperdisk Extreme volumes attached to the same instance, regardless of each volume's provisioned performance.

Achieve higher performance with multiple Hyperdisk Extreme volumes

Certain instances can exceed the maximum performance for a single Hyperdisk Extreme volume— 350,000 IOPS or 5,000  MiB/s. An instance can only achieve these higher limits if you attach multiple Hyperdisk Extreme volumes to the instance.

If an instance's performance limit in the following table exceeds 350,000 IOPS or 5,000  MiB/s, then the instance can only achieve that limit if you attach multiple Hyperdisk Extreme volumes. For example, the performance limit for a c3-*-176 instance using Hyperdisk Extreme is 500,000 IOPS and 10,000 MiB/s. To achieve this maximum performance you must attach at least two Hyperdisk Extreme volumes to the instance.

Disaster protection for Hyperdisk Extreme volumes

You can back up a Hyperdisk Extreme volume with instant snapshots and standard snapshots . Snapshots back up the data on a Hyperdisk Extreme volume at a specific point in time.

You can protect your data in the unlikely event of a regional outage by enabling Asynchronous Replication. Asynchronous Replication maintains a copy of the data on your volume in another region. For example, to protect a Hyperdisk Extreme volume in us-west1 , you can use Asynchronous Replication to replicate the volume to a secondary volume in the us-east4 region. If the volume in us-west1 became unavailable, then you could use the secondary volume in us-east4 .

Cross-zonal replication

You can't replicate Hyperdisk Extreme volumes to another zone. To replicate data to another zone within the same region, you must use Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volumes.

Regional availability for Hyperdisk Extreme

Hyperdisk Extreme is available in all zones and regions.

Limitations

Hyperdisk Extreme volumes have the following limitations:

• Hyperdisk Extreme volumes are zonal and can be accessed from only the zone where they are located.
• Hyperdisk Extreme volumes can only be attached to machines with vCPUs of 60 or higher.
• You can't create an image from a Hyperdisk Extreme volume.
• You can't create a machine image from a Hyperdisk Extreme volume.
• You can't use a Hyperdisk Extreme volume as a boot disk.
• You can't attach Hyperdisk Extreme volumes to more than one VM.
• You can change a Hyperdisk Extreme volume's size and performance every 4 hours.

• Windows instances running on n2-standard-80 machine types can reach at most 80,000 IOPS across all Hyperdisk Extreme volumes that are attached to the instance. To reach up to 160,000 IOPS with N2 instances running Windows, choose one of the following machine types:

  • n2-highmem-80
  • n2-highcpu-80
  • n2-standard-96
  • n2-highmem-96
  • n2-highcpu-96
  • n2-highmem-128
  • n2-standard-128

What's next

• Add a Hyperdisk volume to your VM