Google Cloud launches Z4M storage-optimized instances with up to 168,000 GiB local SSD

[Google Cloud] Google Cloud said its next-generation storage-optimized Z4M machine series is now generally available in Google Compute Engine as both virtual machine and bare-metal instances. According to Google Cloud, Z4M targets AI/ML training and inference workloads such as checkpointing, distributed key-value cache and parallel file systems. The instances are powered by fifth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and offer up to 168,000 GiB of local SSD storage with up to 400 Gbps of Cloud RDMA networking; RDMA reduces data-access latency by up to 60% compared with TCP networking, Google Cloud said. Z4M VMs provide 875 GiB of local SSD per vCPU, with up to 192 vCPUs and up to 1,536 GiB of memory. Google Cloud said Z4M delivers up to 15.6M random-read IOPS and up to 75,600 MiB/s sequential-read throughput, improvements of up to 70% and 110% respectively over Z3.