GCP – Expanding Z3 family with 9 new VMs and a bare metal instance for storage and I/O intensive workloads

Today, we are thrilled to announce the expansion of the Z3 Storage Optimized VM family with the general availability of nine new Z3 virtual machines that offer local SSD capacity ranging from 3 TiB to 18 TiB per VM, complementing existing Z3 VMs which offer 36TiB of Local SSD per VM. We are also very pleased to launch a Z3 bare metal instance, which includes up to 72 TiB of Local SSDs. Z3 VMs enable customers like Shopify, Tenderly and ScyllaDB to achieve impressive performance improvements for their high performance storage workloads by reducing the IO access latency by up to 35% compared to VM instances using previous-generation local SSDs. 

Z3 VMs are designed to run I/O-intensive workloads that require large local storage capacity and high storage performance, including SQL, NoSQL, and vector databases, data analytics, semantic data search and retrieval, and distributed file systems. The Z3 bare metal instance provides direct access to the physical server CPUs and is ideal for workloads that require low-level system access like private and hybrid cloud platforms, custom hypervisors, container platforms, or applications with specialized performance or licensing needs. 

Both Z3 VMs and the bare metal instance are based on Titanium SSDs, which offload local storage processing from CPU resources to deliver real-time data processing, low-latency, high-throughput storage performance and enhanced storage security. Z3 VMs with Titanium SSD offer up to 36 GiB/s of read throughput and up to 9M IOPS, increasing write storage performance by up to 25% compared to previous generation Local SSDs¹.

Based on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, Z3 VMs come with up to 176 vCPUs, 1,408 GiB of memory, and 36 TiB of local storage in 11 virtual machine shapes. The Z3 bare metal instance offers 192 vCPUs, 1,536 GiB of memory and 72 TiB of local storage. Z3 VMs and the bare metal instance deliver the connectivity and storage performance that enterprise workloads need, with up to 100 Gbps in standard bandwidth and up to 200 Gbps with Tier1 networking for high-traffic applications.

The expanded Z3 virtual machine portfolio lets you rightsize your infrastructure and scale your clusters to meet workloads requirements by providing larger total local SSD capacity and higher local SSD capacity per vCPU. Z3 offers two different VM types: the standardlssd VM types, which include five VM shapes that offer about 200 GiB of local SSD per vCPU. They are optimized for data analytics (OLAP), and SQL databases like MySQL and Postgres workloads. The highlssd VM types include six different VM shapes and the Z3 bare metal instance. They offer about 400 GiB of local SSD per vCPU and are optimized for distributed databases, data streaming, large parallel file systems and data search.

What our customers and partners are saying

“We are thrilled to announce Nutanix Cloud Clusters coming to Google Cloud at the end of CY25 as part of Nutanix’s commitment to delivering flexible, hybrid cloud solutions. Google Cloud’s Z3 instance types represent a perfect foundation for Nutanix to enable performance and resilience for enterprise applications. We’re excited about our partnership with Google Cloud in empowering our joint customers with greater choice and simplicity in their cloud journey.” – Saveen Pakala, Vice President of Product Management, Nutanix

“OP Labs contributes to the Optimism protocol, which enables orders of magnitude of improved performance and scalability for Ethereum. Z3 reduces p99 block insertion tail latencies by 30-50% for our most I/O-demanding blockchain nodes compared to N2. By migrating our solution to Z3, we will be able to scale our blockchain nodes to handle L2 state growth in a more performant and cost-effective way.” – Zach Howard Senior Staff Engineer, OP Labs

The launch of Google Cloud’s Z3 storage optimized instances with smaller VM shapes  represents a leap forward in performance for high-traffic NoSQL environments. In internal tests and customer projects, ScyllaDB has impressively leveraged the advantages of Z3 including extremely low latencies under high read and write loads, high IOPS capacity enabling the processing of massive amounts of data and excellent cost-performance ratio for large-scale production systems. We are very excited to offer Z3 family servers in ScyllaDB Cloud, including Bring Your Own Account (BYOA).” – Avi Kivity, Co-founder and CTO, ScyllaDB

“Shopify has found Z3s to be an excellent platform to build our most performance sensitive storage systems on. We experienced a critical need for both large data volumes while remaining sensitive to latency and throughput on the storage side. While Google has a lot of options, local SSD was really the best fit, and Z3s allowed us to achieve the best price/performance along with enhanced stability appropriate for a source of truth Storage workload. Right now we see these storage optimized VMs as our platform of choice for the future.” – Mattie Toia, VP Infrastructure, Shopify

“Tenderly is built to be your go-to for Web3 production and development, bringing all the necessary infrastructure into one place. This allows teams to operate with speed and confidence, making blockchain technology accessible. We’ve seen impressive results running blockchain workloads on Z3 instances, with a 40% improvement on read latency compared to N2 and N2D instances.” – Ilija Petrovic, SRE Lead, Tenderly

“The VAST AI Operating System gives organizations a unified platform to reason over all of their data – structured, unstructured, and streaming through a global namespace that spans cloud and on-prem environments – enabling intelligent agents and applications to operate with full context and real-time speed. ,For customers running on Google Cloud, Z3 VMs complement this vision by providing the ideal storage infrastructure to accelerate these workloads, ensuring AI pipelines run fast and scale effortlessly in the cloud.” – Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO, VAST Data

Z3 VMs are also the physical foundation of AlloyDB, our flagship PostgreSQL-compatible database service, delivering sophisticated multi-level caching. AlloyDB uses Z3’s expansive local SSDs as an ultra-fast cache, holding datasets up to 25x larger than can be stored in memory. Database queries can access these large, cached datasets at latencies that closely approach in-memory performance, particularly when factoring in overall end-to-end application response times. This is a significant advantage for very large databases, including real-time analytical workloads, as AlloyDB’s high-performance columnar engine operates entirely within this massive cache. AlloyDB on Z3 VMs will soon be available in preview, delivering up to 3x better performance than N-series VMs for transactional workloads, particularly for large datasets.

Enhanced maintenance experience

Z3 instances make it easier for you to plan ahead and schedule maintenance operations at a time of your choosing by providing notice from the system several days in advance of a required maintenance. The new Z3 VMs further enhance the maintenance experience by allowing you to live-migrate an instance during maintenance events for VMs with 18 TiB or less of local SSD storage. For Z3 VMs with 36 TiB of local SSD and for Z3 bare metal instances, you’ll also receive in-place upgrades that preserve your data through the planned maintenance events.

Support for Hyperdisk

Z3 VMs support Hyperdisk, Google Cloud’s workload-optimized block storage that lets you optimize the performance for each workload by independently tuning the storage performance and capacity for each instance.

Z3 VMs are compatible with Hyperdisk Balanced, Hyperdisk Throughput, and Extreme Hyperdisk storage for scalable, high-performance network-attached storage, supporting up to 512 TiB of capacity per instance. For general-purpose workloads, Hyperdisk Balanced, with up to 160K IOPS per instance, offers a mix of performance and cost-efficiency. Hyperdisk Extreme delivers ultra-low latency and supports up to 350K IOPS and 5,000 MiB/s throughput per Z3 VM instance and up 500K IOPS and 10,000 MiB/s throughput for the Z3 bare metal instance — making it well-suited for demanding workloads like databases. Using Hyperdisk for persistent storage and Z3 Local SSD for caching creates an optimal storage architecture for high end databases and mission critical workloads

Get started with Z3 today

Z3 VMs and bare metal instances are available today in most regions worldwide. To start using Z3 instances, select Z3 under the new Storage-Optimized machine family when creating a new VM or GKE node pool in the Google Cloud console. Learn more at the Z3 machine series page. Contact your Google Cloud sales representative for more information on regional availability.

^{1. Results are based on Google Cloud’s internal benchmarking}