GCP – C4A, the first Google Axion Processor, now GA with Titanium SSD
Today, we are thrilled to announce the general availability of C4A virtual machines with Titanium SSDs custom designed by Google for cloud workloads that require real-time data processing, with low-latency and high-throughput storage performance. Titanium SSDs on C4A VMs deliver storage performance of up to 2.4M random read IOPS, up to 10.4 GiB/s of read throughput, and up to 35% lower access latency compared to previous generation SSDs.1
Titanium SSDs enhance storage security and performance while offloading local storage processing to free up CPU resources. Titanium SSDs are the first generation of Google SSDs integrated with Titanium, a system that boosts application performance by offloading networking, storage and management from the host CPU into a system of custom silicon, hardware and software on-host and throughout our data centers, connected to the host CPU using a Titanium Offload Processor.
C4A is a VM instance family, based on Google Axion Processors, that provides up to 65% better price-performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances2. Together, C4A and Titanium SSDs deliver industry-leading price-performance for a broad range of Arm-compatible general-purpose workloads such as high-performance databases, analytics engines, and search and workloads that benefit from caching and local storage capacity.
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C4A with Titanium SSDs offer up to 72 vCPUs, 576 GB of memory, and 6 TB of local storage in two shapes — Standard (with 4 GB of memory per vCPU) and High-memory (with 8 GB of memory per vCPU). C4A delivers the connectivity and storage performance that enterprise workloads need with up to 50 Gbps in standard bandwidth and up to 100 Gbps with Tier1 networking for high-traffic applications. C4A instances also support Google Cloud’s latest-generation Balanced and Extreme Hyperdisk storage for scalable, high-performance storage with up to 350k IOPS and 5 GB/s throughput per VM.
Google Cloud customers can use C4A with Titanium SSD in Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Batch, and Dataproc, and more. C4A VMs are also now available in preview in Dataflow, with support for Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, with other services coming soon.
What our customers and partners are saying
“Couchbase Capella Columnar is purpose-built to accelerate complex analytical queries for real-time insights and empower AI-driven applications. Capella Columnar, running on Google Axion C4A instances with Titanium SSDs, delivers unparalleled price-performance, ultra-low latency and scalable compute power for analytic and operational workloads. We look forward to helping organizations deliver premium customer experiences with Capella Columnar on Google Axion processors.” – Matt McDonough, SVP of Product and Partners, Couchbase
“We are excited to introduce Axion-based C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs to Databricks on Google Cloud in the coming weeks, enabling us to deliver ever stronger price-performance and efficiency gains for our customers. The optimizations offered by Google’s latest Axion compute and Hyperdisk storage options will help customers generate more value from their data warehousing and AI investments on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.” – Abhishek Rai, Sr. Director of Engineering, Databricks
“Elastic is committed to enabling customers to drive innovation and cost-efficiency with our Search, AI-powered observability, security, and search solutions on Google Cloud. Google Axion-based C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs provided up to 40% better throughput compared to previous generation VMs in our testing. We look forward to introducing Google Cloud C4A VMs with local Titanium SSD on Elastic Cloud.” – Uri Cohen, VP of Product Management, Elastic
Try C4A now
C4A instances are now generally available via on-demand, Spot VMs, reservations, committed use discounts (CUDs), and FlexCUDs. C4A VMs with Titanium SSDs are available in us-central1 (Iowa), us-east4 (Virginia), us-east1 (SC), europe-west1 (Belgium), europe-west4 (Netherlands), europe-west3 (Frankfurt), europe-west2 (London) and asia-southeast1 (Singapore) today, with availability in additional regions coming soon. Get started on C4A with Titanium SSD today g.co/cloud/axion.
1. Results are based on Google Cloud’s internal benchmarking
2. As of September 2024, based on published listed prices. Performance based on the estimated SPECrate®2017_int_base performance benchmark scores run in production on comparable latest-generation generally-available VMs with general purpose storage types.
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