M4N is also the industry’s first instance of network and block storage optimized with higher memory ratios (up to 26:1) and size (6TB). Powered by 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and built on Google Cloud’s custom Titanium offload architecture, M4N instances deliver up to 25,000 MiB/s (25 GiB/s) of aggregate host storage performance and up to 1 million IOPS when paired with Hyperdisk Extreme — doubling the block storage performance of current M4 instances.
M4N targets workloads that demand both extreme high-density RAM and uncompromising I/O performance, complementing our existing memory-optimized families (such as M1, M2, M3, M4, and X4) by solving specific storage and network bottlenecks for high-throughput enterprise applications.
Built for demanding workloads
|
Workload Category |
Typical Applications |
Why M4N Wins |
|---|---|---|
|
Mission-critical enterprise DBs |
Oracle, SAP HANA, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL |
Memory-to-core ratios (up to 26.57 GB/vCPU) paired with 25 GiB/s storage for rapid data ingestion, transaction logging, and zero-stall backup cycles. |
|
Generative AI and RAG data layers |
Milvus, Pinecone, Qdrant, Vespa, Redis, In-Memory Context Caching |
Sub-millisecond similarity search across massive vector indexes in RAM, combined with 400 Gbps network bandwidth for distributed model retrieval. |
|
Enterprise healthcare and ERP |
Epic Systems (Operational Database), SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA |
Sustained I/O headroom that prevents query latency spikes during peak clinical/transactional hours. |
|
Real-time analytics and EDA |
Electronic Design Automation, Genomic Modeling, In-Memory OLAP |
High memory capacity to load massive datasets entirely in RAM with maximum storage bandwidth for checkpoint dumps. |
Optimizing Oracle licensing costs
Enterprise IT departments struggle with the rising cost of core-based software licensing. For workloads like Oracle database, licensing fees are typically calculated based on the number of vCPUs or physical cores assigned to the instance. Historically, this has forced a difficult trade-off: paying for more compute cores than necessary just to obtain the required amount of RAM and storage performance.
M4N changes this paradigm with its industry-leading high memory-to-vCPU ratio. By providing the highest per-core IOPS and throughput for high-memory instances of all the leading hyperscalers, M4N allows database administrators to:
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Reduce TCO and licensing overhead: Stop over-provisioning of cores while meeting Oracle database performance density requirements, resulting in over 20% TCO reduction compared to similar offerings from leading hyperscalers.
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Right-size infrastructure: Allocate the exact amount of compute power needed for the workload while still accessing massive memory pools.
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Improve cache-hit ratios: With more memory available per core, larger portions of the database can reside in the system global area (SGA), reducing expensive I/O operations and further boosting efficiency.
What customers are saying
Early experiences with M4N show that workload-optimized infrastructure is the engine for transformation.
“Before M4N, meeting our demanding I/O requirements on Google Cloud often required over-provisioning our compute to achieve the necessary performance density. The new M4N instances solve this by delivering high throughput across the smaller to larger shapes.” – Sherri Trojan, Sr Principal Solution Architect, Sabre
