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Block Storage for VPC profiles

Block Storage for VPC profiles

When you provision Block Storage for VPC volumes by using the IBM Cloud console, CLI, API, or Terraform you specify a volume profile that best meets your storage requirements. Profiles are generally available as three predefined IOPS levels or with custom IOPS. The volume profiles from the tiered family provide reliable IOPS/GB performance for volumes up to 16,000 GB capacity. With a custom volume profile, you can specify your own IOPS value in a range that is appropriate for your selected volume capacity.

Block Storage profile families

When you create a Block Storage volume, you can select from various profiles.

  • Select a profile from the tiered profile family when you want to pick a profile where performance scales with capacity of the volume.
  • Select the profile from the custom profile family if your performance requirements don't fall within any of the predefined IOPS tiers. When you select the custom profile, you can define your IOPS within a range that depends on the capacity that you specified.

The following table shows the available storage profiles with their different properties.

Table 1. Block Storage profiles and performance levels.
Family Profile IOPS[1] IOPS per volume Max throughput[2] Capacity (GB)
tiered general-purpose 3 IOPS/GB 3,000 - 48,000 670 MBps 10 - 16,000
tiered 5iops-tier 5 IOPS/GB 3,000 - 48,000 768 MBps 10 - 9,600
tiered 10iops-tier 10 IOPS/GB 3,000 - 48,000 1024 MBps 10 - 4,800
custom custom 1 - 100 IOPS/GB 100 - 48,000[3] 1024 MBps 10 - 16,000

IOPS values are based on 16k I/O size. Baseline throughput is determined by the number of IOPS multiplied by the throughput multiplier. The throughput multiplier is 16 KB for 3 IOPS/GB or 5 IOPS/GB tiers, or 256 KB for 10 IOPS/GB or custom IOPS tiers. The higher the IOPS that you specify, the higher the throughput the volume can handle. Maximum throughput is 1024 MBps.

Moving volumes across volume-profiles that belong to different families is not allowed.

Tiered volume profiles

When you create your storage volume, you can select from three predefined IOPS tiers. Choose the profile that provides optimal performance for your Compute workloads. Table 2 describes the IOPS performance that you can expect for each tier.

Table 2. IOPS tier profiles and performance levels for each tier
Intended workload IOPS rate Capacity range IOPS range Throughput multiplier
general-purpose - Workloads that host small databases for web applications or store virtual machine disk images for a hypervisor. 3 IOPS/GB 10 - 16,000 GB 3,000 - 48,000 16 KB
5iops-tier - High I/O intensity workloads - Workloads characterized by a large percentage of active data, such as transactional and other performance-sensitive databases. 5 IOPS/GB 10 - 9,600 GB 3,000 - 48,000 16 KB
10iops-tier - Demanding storage workloads - Data intensive workloads created by NoSQL databases, data processing for video, machine learning, and analytics. 10 IOPS/GB 10 - 4,800 GB 3,000 - 48,000 256 KB

Max IOPS for all volume profiles from the tiered family starts at 3,000 IOPS. Max IOPS then increases, based on the storage tier and volume size, up to the Max IOPS in Table 2. While you can't customize the IOPS value of a volume with a tiered profile, you can change the volume to another tiered profile and adjust the IOPS that way.

Custom volume profile

Custom IOPS is a good option when you have well-defined performance requirements that do not fall within a predefined IOPS tier. You can customize the IOPS by specifying the total IOPS for the volume within the range for its volume size. You can provision volumes with IOPS performance from 100 IOPS to 48,000 IOPS, based on volume size.

The following table shows the available IOPS ranges based on volume capacity for the custom profile.

Table 3. Available IOPS based on volume size
Volume capacity (GB) IOPS range
10 -39 100 - 1,000
40 - 79 100 - 2,000
80 - 99 100 - 4,000
100 - 499 100 - 6,000
500 - 999 100 - 10,000
1,000 - 1,999 100 - 20,000
2,000 - 3,999 200 - 40,000
4,000 - 7,999 300 - 40,000
8,000 - 9,999 500 - 48,000
10,000 - 16,000 1,000 - 48,000

Througput for the custom profile is calculated by using a multiplier of 256 KB. If your application needs more IOPS and throughput, you can increase the volume size and specify a new IOPS value in a higher range. Capacity and IOPS can be modified only when the volume is attached to a running instance.

Profiles for boot volumes

By default, boot volumes are created with the general-purpose volume profile with 100 GB capacity during instance provisioning. Boot volume capacity can be increased by modifying the boot volume, up to 250 GB. Boot volume IOPS and bandwidth are never reduced to be less than 3000 IOPS or 393 MBps.

How virtual server profiles relate to volume profiles

Virtual server profiles are a combination of vCPU and RAM that can be instantiated quickly to start a virtual server instance. Select from three families of instance profiles based on your workload requirements. These requirements can range from common workloads to CPU-intensive or memory-intensive workloads.

Similarly, volume profiles provide a range of capacity and performance for secondary volumes. By default, a 100 GB primary boot volume is created when you create a virtual server instance. You can also create and attach secondary volumes. When you create a data volume as part of instance creation, you can select a volume profile that best meets your storage requirements for your Compute workloads. In general, as your Compute requirements increase, you need higher IOPS performance. Table 4 shows this relationship.

Table 4. Relationship of Block Storage volume profiles to virtual server instance profiles
IOPS tier storage profile Virtual server profile
3 IOPS/GB Balanced for common workloads.
5 IOPS/GB Compute for intensive CPU demands.
10 IOPS/GB Memory for memory-intensive workloads.

I/O size and performance

The application I/O size directly impacts storage performance. If the application I/O size is smaller than the throughput multiplier that is used by the profile to calculate the volume’s bandwidth limit, the IOPS limit is reached before the throughput limit. Conversely, if the application I/O size is larger, the throughput limit is reached before the IOPS limit. For more information, see How I/O size affects performance.

Storage capacity

In this documentation, we refer to storage capacity by using the unit GB (Gigabytes) to align with the industry standard terminology. However, the actual provisioning and billing of storage are based on GiB (Gibibytes).

The difference between GB and GiB lies in their numerical representation:

  • GB (Gigabyte) is a decimal unit, where 1 GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes
  • GiB (Gibibyte), is a binary unit, where 1 GiB equals 1,073,741,824 bytes

To ensure transparency, please note that your provisioned storage and associated charges are calculated based on GiB. Rest assured that you receive the exact amount of storage you expect and are billed accurately for the GiB you use. For more information, see the FAQs.

Viewing available volume profiles

You can view available volume profiles by using the IBM Cloud UI, CLI, API, or Terraform.

In the console

When you create a Block Storage volume in the IBM Cloud console, you can see the available profiles on two tabs.

  • For IOPS tiers, you can see 3 tiles with the different performance levels. Select the one that best suits your needs.
  • For Custom IOPS, you can specify the size of your volume and IOPS range based on the size of the volume. As you type the IOPS value, the console shows the acceptable range. You can also click the storage size link to see Table 3.

From the CLI

To view the list of available profiles by using the CLI, run the following command:

ibmcloud is volume-profiles

$ ibmcloud is volume-profiles
Listing volume profiles in region us-east under account TEST as user test.user@ibm.com...
Name              Family   
general-purpose   tiered   
5iops-tier        tiered   
10iops-tier       tiered   
custom            custom

To view details of the profile, run the ibmcloud is volume-profile command with the name of the profile that you are interested in seeing.

The following example shows the details of the 10iops-tier.

$ ibmcloud is volume-profile 10iops-tier
Getting volume profile 10iops-tier under account Test Account as user test.user@ibm.com...
                                          
Name                                   10iops-tier   
Family                                 tiered   
Adjustable IOPS                        false   
Boot capacity                          Max   Min      
                                       250   10      
                                          
Capacity                               Max    Min   Default   Step      
                                       4800   10    10        1      
                                          
IOPS                                   Max    Min   Default   Step      
                                       48000  10    10        1

For more information about available command options, see ibmcloud is volume-profile.

With the API

To see the available profiles, make a GET /volume/profiles request.

curl -X GET \
$vpc_api_endpoint/v1/volume/profiles?$api_version&generation=2 \
-H "Authorization: $iam_token"

For more information about this method, see the API reference for listing all volume profiles and retrieving a volume profile.

With Terraform

  1. To use Terraform, download the Terraform CLI and configure the IBM Cloud® Provider plug-in. For more information, see Getting started with Terraform.

  2. VPC infrastructure services use a specific regional endpoint, which targets to us-south by default. If your VPC is created in another region, make sure to target the appropriate region in the provider block in the provider.tf file. See the following example of targeting a region other than the default us-south.

    provider "ibm" {
   region = "eu-de"
}

  3. Import the list of available volume profiles as a read-only data source.

    data "ibm_is_volume_profiles" "example" {
}

    For more information, see ibm_is_volume_profile.

Next Steps

For more information about how to expand volume capacity, see expanding Block Storage volume capacity.

For more information about how to change the IOPS tier or Custom IOPS for an existing volume, see Adjusting IOPS of a Block Storage for VPC volume.

For more information about Balanced, Compute, and Memory profiles for Virtual Servers for VPC, see x86-64 instance profiles.

  1. IOPS values are based on 16k I/O size. ↩︎

  2. Baseline throughput is determined by the number of IOPS multiplied by the throughput multiplier. The throughput multiplier is 16 KB for 3 IOPS/GB or 5 IOPS/GB tiers. The throughput multiplier for the 10 IOPS/GB tier and the custom profile is 256 KB. The higher the IOPS that you specify, the higher the throughput. Maximum throughput is 1024 MBps. ↩︎

  3. The IOPS range that is available is dependent on the volume capacity. For more information, see Table 3. ↩︎