Linode Goes All In on NVMe Block Storage and Outperforms DigitalOcean, AWS and Azure

Linode LLC is rolling out faster, better performing, and more reliable NVMe storage across its entire block storage fleet.

The rollout kicks off in the company’s Atlanta, GA data center, with the remainder of its global network upgrading over the next quarter.

Company‘s NVMe rollout includes the first erasure-coded block storage cluster, a method for storing data in Ceph that uses an algorithm to slice data into chunks, resulting in improvement in storage over replicated clusters.

“We put a lot of effort into making our block storage platform more performant and efficient,” said Chris Aker, founder and CEO. “Using erasure-coded clusters, we’re able to extract 160% more usable storage out of the same raw disk capacity. It’s an incredible increase in storage efficiency done in a way that allows us to deliver high performance without creating a premium tier like most other providers would.”

NVMe is the hardware interface for next-gen SSDs. The technology represents an improvement over traditional spinning HDD drives, with a 10-20x increase in throughput and up to 2000x improvement in IO/s. The company is one of a first hyperscale cloud providers to deploy NVMe at scale.

NVMe block storage makes attaching available and scalable storage volumes to cloud instances easy and fast. With it, customers can experience a performance upgrade to power use-cases such as database storage and other tasks where high storage speeds and consistency are critical.

“Making things faster is good. Making them faster, more resilient, and more reliable is even better. And doing it in a way that doesn’t cost customers more is what developers have come to expect from us,” said Aker.

Early research by Cloud Spectator research shows that ‘Linode Dedicated and Shared’ plans outfitted with the NVMe block storage outperform comparable plans from fellow alternative cloud provider DigitalOcean, as well as premium tiers from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company, already a price-performance leader in overall CPU benchmarks from earlier this year, will release a full report featuring its block storage offering in early 4Q21.

The performance upgrade is provided free to all company’s customers. Linode Block Storage rates will remain at $0.10/GB per month. Customers with existing block storage volumes in Linode’s 10 other global data centers will be able to migrate their block storage volumes when NVMe becomes available.