Google Cloud Hyperdisk Balanced, Hyperdisk Balanced HA vs Nirvana Accelerated Block Storage (ABS)

Google Cloud Announced Faster Block Storage at Next '26. Here's What to Know Before You Buy - performance specs, pricing models, and total cost of ownership.

Google Cloud announced Hyperdisk Balanced improvements at Next '26 - up to 160K IOPS, 2.4 GiB/s per volume, sub-millisecond latency. The engineering is real. But the headline specs don't tell the full pricing and performance story. Here are three things worth understanding before making a decision.

TL;DR: Google Cloud (GCP) Hyperdisk Balanced's 160K IOPS is a provisioned maximum, not a baseline - you start at 3,000 free IOPS and pay $0.005/IOPS/month above that. VM-level caps mean you may need a larger instance to use what you provision. And the HA tier costs 2× standard pricing. At 20K sustained IOPS on 1 TB, Nirvana ABS costs $282.62/month full stack (compute + storage) vs $450.50/month on GCP - 37% cheaper.

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"Up to 160K IOPS per volume" - but the baseline is 3,000.

Google Cloud Hyperdisk Balanced includes 3,000 IOPS and 140 MiB/s as a free baseline. Every IOPS above 3,000 costs $0.005/month. Every MiB/s above 140 costs $0.04/month. The 160K number is the provisioned maximum - what you can configure, not what you get by default.

To actually provision 160K IOPS on a 1 TB volume:

• Storage: $81.92
• IOPS: 157,000 × $0.005 = $785.00
• Total: $866.92/month - before additional throughput charges

On Nirvana ABS, 1 TB costs $95.74/month with 20,000 sustained IOPS included. Burst to 600,000. No per-IOPS metering. No separate throughput line item.

The pricing models are fundamentally different. Hyperdisk Balanced is provisioned - you configure and pay for performance separately. ABS is flat - IOPS and throughput are included in the storage price.

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Hyperdisk Balanced HA is smart engineering - at 2× the price.

Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability dynamically routes full disk performance to the active VM in an active/passive database setup. Instead of splitting IOPS across primary and standby, the active node gets everything. This is a genuinely useful optimization for HA databases like SQL Server or PostgreSQL.

Worth knowing: Hyperdisk Balanced HA costs 2× the standard Hyperdisk Balanced rate - storage, IOPS, and throughput all double. Google's docs confirm this: "The cost of Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability storage is twice the cost of Hyperdisk Balanced storage."

At 1 TB and 20K IOPS, that's ~$333.84/month for a single HA volume vs $95.74/month on ABS.

ABS handles high availability differently - volumes are persistent and decoupled from compute, so if a VM fails, the workload migrates and reattaches the same volume with full IOPS intact. It's a simpler model that doesn't require a separate HA storage tier.

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VM-level performance caps add a hidden compute cost.

Even if you provision high IOPS on a Hyperdisk Balanced volume, your VM has its own IOPS ceiling based on machine type. Google publishes per-VM Hyperdisk performance limits in a separate table from the per-volume limits.

Google's docs are clear about this: "For a Hyperdisk volume to reach its provisioned performance, you must attach it to a compute instance that supports the same level of performance or higher." IOPS limits are also half-duplex - if your VM has a 50,000 IOPS limit, reads and writes combined can't exceed 50K.

This means to use high IOPS, you may need a larger (more expensive) VM. Here's what the compute cost looks like on GCP's N2 series vs Nirvana's equivalent instances:

GCP Instance	vCPUs	RAM	Monthly Cost	Nirvana Equivalent	Monthly Cost	Savings
n2-standard-2	2	8 GB	$70.90	n1-standard-2	$46.72	34%
n2-standard-8	8	32 GB	$283.58	n1-standard-8	$186.88	34%
n2-standard-16	16	64 GB	$567.17	n1-standard-16	$373.76	34%
n2-standard-32	32	128 GB	$1,134.34	n1-standard-32	$747.52	34%
n2-standard-64	64	256 GB	$2,268.68	n1-standard-64	$1,495.04	34%
n2-standard-80	80	320 GB	$2,835.85	n1-standard-96 (96 vCPU, 384 GB)	$2,242.56	21%

Nirvana compute runs 26–34% cheaper at equivalent configurations. But the real cost difference compounds when you add storage.

Full stack cost: compute + storage at 20K sustained IOPS

A realistic database workload - 8 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB storage, 20K sustained IOPS:

Component	Nirvana (n1-standard-8 + ABS)	GCP (n2-standard-8 + Hyperdisk Balanced)	GCP (n2-standard-8 + Hyperdisk Balanced HA)
Compute	$186.88	$283.58	$283.58
Storage (1 TB)	$95.74	$81.92	$163.84
IOPS above baseline	$0 (20K included)	17,000 × $0.005 = $85.00	17,000 × $0.01 = $170.00
Throughput	$0 (300 MB/s included)	$0 (140 MiB/s baseline)	$0 (140 MiB/s baseline)
Total monthly	$282.62	$450.50	$617.42
Annual cost	$3,391	$5,406	$7,409

Nirvana saves 37% vs Hyperdisk Balanced and 54% vs Hyperdisk Balanced HA on the full stack. That's $2,015/year per instance vs standard, $4,018/year vs HA. At 10 instances, the difference is $20K–$40K annually.

At higher IOPS targets (50K, 100K), the gap widens further - you're paying more per-IOPS on Hyperdisk Balanced and potentially need a larger VM to avoid the per-instance IOPS cap.

On ABS, 20K sustained IOPS works on any Nirvana instance. There's no VM-to-disk performance matrix to cross-reference.

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Bottom line.

Google built a solid storage tier - but it's a general-purpose cloud, built for the widest possible set of workloads. Nirvana rebuilt the cloud from the metal up with a performance-first mindset. SOC II Type 2 compliant, trusted by 50+ production clients including Goldsky, Aori, BitGo, Fireblocks, Nansen, Keyrock, and Monad.

Every use case Google Cloud mentioned - PostgreSQL, SQL Server, high-availability databases - we run those today. Along with ClickHouse at heavy ingest, Elasticsearch across large datasets, vector databases powering RAG pipelines, and trading systems where latency variance is business risk. 20,000 sustained IOPS at ~$93.50/TB/month. Compute 26–34% cheaper. Zero egress.

The numbers are above. Run them.

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Ultra-fast Block Storage with High IOPS, powering blockchain, AI and real time systems.

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