Google Cloud Compute Engine Storage Options

Hyperdisk

• Hyperdisk is the fastest and most efficient durable block storage for Compute Engine, recommended by Google for boot and data disks.
• Hyperdisk leverages Google’s Titanium storage offload technology for higher IOPS and throughput than Persistent Disk.
• Hyperdisk volumes are durable network storage devices that function as physical disks attached to compute instances.
• Hyperdisk provides customizable performance — IOPS and throughput can be configured independently and adjusted dynamically while in use.
• Hyperdisk volumes are portable and can be detached from one instance and attached to another.
• Hyperdisk provides built-in torn write protection with an atomic write unit of 128 KB, which can improve database write throughput by up to 25% by eliminating the need for doublewrite buffers.
• Hyperdisk supports Confidential Computing mode for Hyperdisk Balanced volumes attached to Confidential VMs.

Hyperdisk Types

• Hyperdisk Balanced — Best fit for most workloads; supports boot disks, virtual desktops, databases (Postgres, MySQL). Max 160,000 IOPS / 2,400 MiB/s throughput. Supports multi-writer (up to 8 instances).
• Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability — Synchronously replicates data across two zones in the same region. Max 100,000 IOPS / 2,400 MiB/s. Supports multi-writer (up to 8 instances). Designed for RPO of 0.
• Hyperdisk Extreme — Highest IOPS for demanding workloads (SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL Server). Max 350,000 IOPS / 5,000 MiB/s throughput.
• Hyperdisk Throughput — High throughput for scale-out analytics (Hadoop, Spark, Kafka) and cold storage. Max 2,400 MiB/s. Cost-effective for capacity-intensive applications.
• Hyperdisk ML — Designed for AI/ML inference and training; supports read-only attachment to up to 2,500 instances simultaneously. Highest read-only throughput.

Hyperdisk Storage Pools

• Hyperdisk Storage Pools allow purchasing capacity and performance in bulk, reducing storage TCO by up to 40%.
• Simplifies planning with thin provisioning, data reduction, and capacity pooling.
• Supports Hyperdisk Balanced and Hyperdisk Throughput volumes.
• Hyperdisk Exapools are designed for workloads requiring 1 PiB+ capacity or 1 TiB/s+ throughput per zone (e.g., large-scale AI/ML, parallel file systems).

Hyperdisk High Availability & Disaster Recovery

• Cross-zonal (synchronous) — Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability replicates data synchronously between two zones in the same region.
• Cross-regional (asynchronous) — Asynchronous Replication continuously copies data to a secondary region. Supported for Hyperdisk Balanced, Hyperdisk Extreme, and Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability.

Hyperdisk Machine Series Support

• Hyperdisk Balanced is supported on C3, C3D, C4, C4A, C4D, N4, N4A, N4D, M3, M4, A3, A4, G4, Z3 and other 3rd-gen+ machine series.
• Older machine series (N1, E2, C2, C2D, T2A) do not support Hyperdisk and must use Persistent Disk.
• Generally, use Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability for 3rd-gen+ machine series and Regional Persistent Disks for 2nd-gen or older.

Persistent Disk

• Persistent disks are durable network storage devices that the instances can access like physical disks in a desktop or a server.
• Persistent disks are used as boot disks.
• Data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks.
• Compute Engine manages the physical disks and the data distribution to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.
• Persistent disks are located independently from the VM instances and can be detached or moved to keep the data even after the instance is deleted.
• Persistent disk performance scales automatically with size, so they can be resized or additional ones added to meet the performance and storage space requirements.
• Google now recommends Hyperdisk for highest performance and advanced features on supported machine series.

Persistent Disk Types

• Standard persistent disks (pd-standard) are backed by standard hard disk drives (HDD).
• Balanced persistent disks (pd-balanced) are backed by solid-state drives (SSD). They are an alternative to SSD persistent disks that balance performance and cost.
• SSD persistent disks (pd-ssd) are backed by solid-state drives (SSD).
• Extreme persistent disks (pd-extreme) provide configurable IOPS (2,500 to 120,000) with SSD-backed storage for high-performance database workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Server.

Zonal Persistent Disks

• Zonal persistent disks provide durable storage and replication of data within a single zone in a region.
• Persistent disks have built-in redundancy to protect the data against equipment failure and to ensure data availability through datacenter maintenance events.
• For additional space on the persistent disks, resize the disks and resize the single file system rather than repartitioning and formatting.
• Compute Engine automatically encrypts the data in transit, before it travels outside of the instance to persistent disk storage space.
• Zonal persistent disk remains encrypted either with system-defined keys or with customer-supplied keys.

Regional Persistent Disks

• Regional persistent disks provide durable storage and replication of data between two zones in the same region.
• Regional persistent disks are also designed to work with regional managed instance groups.
• Zonal outage can be handled by force attaching the disk to the standby instance, even if the disk can’t be detached from the original VM.
• Regional persistent disks are designed for
  • workloads that require a lower RPO and RTO compared to using persistent disk snapshots.
  • write performance is less critical than data redundancy across multiple zones.
• Regional persistent disks cannot be used with memory-optimized machines and compute-optimized machines.
• For 3rd-gen+ machine series, Google recommends Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability instead of Regional Persistent Disks.

Local SSD

• Local SSDs are physically attached to the server that hosts the VM instance.
• Local SSDs have higher throughput and lower latency than standard persistent disks or SSD persistent disks.
• Data stored on a local SSD persists only until the instance is stopped or deleted.
• Local SSD disks cannot be used as boot disks.
• Local SSD disks can be attached only during instance creation, and not once the instance is created.
• Local SSDs performance gains require certain trade-offs in availability, durability, and flexibility. Because of these trade-offs, Local SSD storage isn’t automatically replicated and all data on the local SSD might be lost if the instance terminates for any reason.
• Each local SSD is 375 GB in size, but a maximum of 24 local SSD partitions can be attached for a total of 9 TB per instance.
• Compute Engine automatically encrypts the data when it is written to local SSD storage space. Customer-supplied encryption keys is not supported with local SSDs.

Local SSD on Newer Machine Series

• For C3, C3D, C4, and C4D machine series, Local SSD is available only with specific machine types that end in -lssd (e.g., c3-standard-88-lssd, c4-standard-96-lssd).
• For Z3, A4X, A4, A3, and A2 Ultra machine series, every machine type comes with Local SSD storage.
• C4 VMs with Intel Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids) use Titanium Local SSD with up to 35% lower access latency compared to prior generations.
• Local SSD cannot be used with shared-core machine types (e.g., E2).

Cloud Storage Buckets

• Cloud Storage buckets are the most flexible, scalable, and durable storage option for the VM instances.
• Cloud Storage is ideal if you don’t require the lower latency of Persistent Disks and Local SSDs, and can store the data in a Cloud Storage bucket.
• Performance of Cloud Storage depends on the selected storage class.
• Standard storage class used in the same location as the instance gives performance that is comparable to persistent disks but with higher latency and less consistent throughput characteristics.
• Cloud Storage buckets have built-in redundancy to protect the data against equipment failure and to ensure data availability through datacenter maintenance events.
• Cloud Storage buckets aren’t restricted to the zone where the instance is located. Multiregional Cloud Storage buckets store the data redundantly across at least two regions within a larger multiregional location.
• Cloud Storage bucket can be mounted on the instance as a file system using Cloud Storage FUSE (gcsfuse).
• Cloud Storage allows read and write data to a bucket from multiple instances simultaneously.
• However, Cloud Storage buckets are object stores that don’t have the same write constraints as a POSIX file system and can’t be used as boot disks. Multiple instances working on the same file can lead to overwritten data.
• Cloud Storage supports both encryption at rest and in transit.

Cloud Storage FUSE

• Cloud Storage FUSE (gcsfuse) is a fully supported, GA product that allows mounting Cloud Storage buckets as local file systems on Compute Engine instances.
• Particularly beneficial for AI/ML workloads that use frameworks requiring file-based data access (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Supports caching, parallel downloads, and performance profiles for optimized workloads.
• Provides a cost-effective alternative to persistent disk storage for read-heavy workloads.

Filestore

• Filestore provides high-performance, fully managed network-attached storage (NAS) file storage using NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 protocols.
• Filestore is ideal for workloads requiring a shared file system across multiple Compute Engine instances.

Filestore Service Tiers

• Basic (HDD/SSD) — Entry-level, single-zone file storage for development and testing.
• Zonal — High-performance, single-zone storage with up to 26 GiB/s throughput. Ideal for AI/ML training workloads.
• Regional — Multi-zone availability within a region for business-critical workloads.
• Enterprise — Multi-zone, multi-share capable, regional resilience for mission-critical enterprise workloads. Supports the Filestore CSI driver for GKE.

Storage Options Comparison

Storage Options Performance Comparison

GCP Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• GCP services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• GCP exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with GCP updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. A company needs block storage for a database running on a C4 machine that requires the highest IOPS with configurable performance. Which storage option should they use?
   1. Persistent Disk SSD (pd-ssd)
   2. Hyperdisk Balanced
   3. Hyperdisk Extreme
   4. Local SSD
   Show Answer

   Answer: c – Hyperdisk Extreme provides the highest IOPS (up to 350,000) with configurable performance on C4 machine series.
2. An organization wants to ensure zero data loss (RPO = 0) across zones for their mission-critical application running on C3 VMs. Which storage option provides this?
   1. Regional Persistent Disk
   2. Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability
   3. Hyperdisk Balanced with Asynchronous Replication
   4. Cloud Storage with multi-region bucket
   Show Answer

   Answer: b – Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability synchronously replicates data across two zones within the same region with RPO of 0. For 3rd-gen+ machine series, it is preferred over Regional Persistent Disks.

3. A data science team needs to share a large ML model dataset across 500 GPU instances for inference. Which storage type is most appropriate?
   1. Hyperdisk Balanced with multi-writer
   2. Hyperdisk ML
   3. Hyperdisk Throughput
   4. Cloud Storage
   Show Answer

   Answer: b – Hyperdisk ML supports read-only attachment to up to 2,500 instances simultaneously and provides the highest read-only throughput, making it ideal for ML inference workloads.

4. Which of the following statements about Local SSD on newer machine series (C3, C4) is correct?
   1. Local SSD can be attached to any C4 machine type after instance creation
   2. Local SSD is available only on machine types ending in -lssd (e.g., c3-standard-88-lssd)
   3. Local SSD is automatically attached to all C3 machine types
   4. Local SSD on C4 uses HDD storage for cost savings
   Show Answer

   Answer: b – For C3, C3D, C4, and C4D machine series, Local SSD is only available with specific machine types ending in -lssd.

5. A company has a Hadoop cluster requiring high throughput, low-cost storage. Which Hyperdisk type is most suitable?
   1. Hyperdisk Balanced
   2. Hyperdisk Extreme
   3. Hyperdisk Throughput
   4. Hyperdisk ML
   Show Answer

   Answer: c – Hyperdisk Throughput is designed for scale-out analytics workloads like Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka, providing high throughput at a cost-effective price.
6. Which Hyperdisk feature can improve MySQL database write performance by up to 25%?
   1. Customizable IOPS
   2. Torn write protection
   3. Storage Pools
   4. Multi-writer mode
   Show Answer

   Answer: b – Hyperdisk’s built-in torn write protection eliminates the need for database-level doublewrite buffers, increasing write throughput by up to 25%.

7. An organization running N1 VMs needs high-performance block storage. Which storage option is available?
   1. Hyperdisk Balanced
   2. Hyperdisk Extreme
   3. Extreme Persistent Disk (pd-extreme)
   4. Hyperdisk ML
   Show Answer

   Answer: c – N1 machine series does not support any Hyperdisk type. Extreme Persistent Disk (pd-extreme) is available for high-performance needs on older machine series.

8. Which storage option should be used to protect Hyperdisk data from a regional outage?
   1. Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability
   2. Regional Persistent Disk
   3. Asynchronous Replication
   4. Cloud Storage multi-region bucket
   Show Answer

   Answer: c – Asynchronous Replication maintains a copy of Hyperdisk data in another region for cross-regional disaster recovery. Hyperdisk Balanced HA only protects against zonal outages within a region.

References

• Google Cloud – Block Storage (Disks) Overview
• Google Cloud – Hyperdisk Overview
• Google Cloud – About Persistent Disk
• Google Cloud – About Local SSD
• Google Cloud – Add Local SSD
• Google Cloud – Cloud Storage FUSE
• Google Cloud – Filestore Overview
• Google Cloud – Hyperdisk Storage Pools