A few months ago, Google Cloud introduced C4A, its virtual machine (VM) instances powered by Axion, the company’s first Arm-based CPU. Now, taking this initiative further, Google is unveiling C4A with Titanium SSDs, its custom-designed local disks optimized for superior storage and performance.
This enhancement strengthens the C4A lineup, delivering VMs designed to elevate cloud performance for workloads requiring real-time data processing. According to Google, these VMs combine ultra-low latency and high-throughput storage with cost efficiency, making them ideal for applications like high-performance databases, analytics engines, and search tasks.
Currently, Titanium SSD-equipped C4A VMs are available in services such as Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Batch, and Dataproc. Additionally, standard C4A VMs are available in preview for Dataflow, with upcoming support planned for Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, and other services.
Google Cloud’s C4A instances typically come with three storage options: Persistent Disk, Hyperdisk or Local SSD. Persistent Disk is the standard block storage service where performance is shared between volumes of the same type. Hyperdisk, on the other hand, provides dedicated performance, supporting up to 350,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 5 GB/s throughput per volume — delivering significantly better performance than Persistent Disk.
However, in some workloads, especially those demanding local storage capacity, even Hyperdisk can struggle. This is where the local SSDs come in, with Titanium SSDs being the latest innovation in the category.
The new C4A instances with Titanium SSDs deliver up to 2.4M random read input/output operations per second, 10.4 GiB/s of read throughput, and 35% lower access latency compared to previous generation SSDs.
Titanium SSDs, which are directly attached to the compute instances inside the host server, offload storage and networking tasks from the CPU, freeing up resources to boost application security and throughput performance. This innovation comes from Google’s Titanium system. It runs the offloading job from the host CPU into a system of custom silicon, hardware and software on-host and throughout the company’s data centers, connected to the host CPU using a Titanium Offload Processor.
At the core, the new C4A family with Titanium SSDs comes with up to 72 vCPUs, 576 GB memory, and 6 TB of local storage. Enterprises can choose between Standard (4 GB/vCPU) and High-memory (8 GB/vCPU) configurations. Connectivity options, on the other hand, can scale up to 100 Gbps.
All of this can easily support high-traffic workloads with real-time data processing such as web/app servers, high-performance databases, data analytics engines and search. Further, it can power applications requiring in-memory caching, media streaming and transcoding and CPU-based AI/ML.
“C4A…provides up to 65% better price-performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances. Together, C4A and Titanium SSDs deliver industry-leading price-performance for a broad range of Arm-compatible general-purpose workloads,” Varun Shah and Nate Baum, senior product managers at Google Cloud, wrote in a joint blog post.
While C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs have just become generally available, some early adopters are already seeing performance gains from them. This includes big names like Couchbase and Elastic.
Matt McDonough, SVP of product and partners at Couchbase, highlighted how Capella Columnar, running on Google Axion C4A instances with Titanium SSDs, delivers unparalleled price-performance benefits, ultra-low latency and scalable compute power for analytic and operational workloads. Similarly, Elastic’s Uri Cohen said the company observed 40% higher throughput than prior VM generations.
C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs are now generally available in key regions, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, with plans to expand further. Customers can access them through on-demand, Spot VMs and discounted pricing options.
With significant advancements in performance, energy efficiency and scalability, C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs cater to modern enterprise demands, setting a new benchmark for cloud workloads.
Một vài tháng trước, Google Cloud đã ra mắt C4A dưới dạng phiên bản máy ảo (VM) được hỗ trợ bởi Axion, CPU dựa trên Arm đầu tiên của hãng. Giờ đây, bước tiếp theo trong công việc này là họ sẽ ra mắt C4A với SSD Titan — các ổ đĩa cục bộ được thiết kế tùy chỉnh nhằm mục đích nâng cao hiệu suất và lưu trữ.
Với động thái này, Google đang củng cố danh mục C4A của mình và cung cấp các máy ảo có thể nâng cao hơn nữa hiệu suất đám mây cho các khối lượng công việc yêu cầu xử lý dữ liệu theo thời gian thực. Theo công ty, các máy ảo kết hợp độ trễ cực thấp và lưu trữ thông lượng cao với hiệu quả về chi phí, tạo ra một gói lý tưởng để chạy các ứng dụng như cơ sở dữ liệu hiệu suất cao, công cụ phân tích và tìm kiếm.
Hiện tại, Google Cloud đang cung cấp các máy ảo C4A được trang bị SSD Titanium này trong các dịch vụ như Computing Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Batch và Dataproc. Máy ảo C4A tiêu chuẩn cũng có sẵn ở dạng xem trước trong Dataflow, với sự hỗ trợ cho Cloud SQL, AlloyDB và các dịch vụ khác đang được triển khai.