Google Cloud made Z4D virtual-machine and bare-metal instances generally available, offering up to 84,000 GiB of local solid-state storage.

Google Cloud announced general availability of the Z4D storage-optimized machine family in Compute Engine, in both virtual-machine (VM) and bare-metal configurations. Powered by fifth-generation AMD EPYC “Turin” CPUs and Titanium enhancements, the family offers up to 84,000 GiB of local solid-state drive storage, 384 virtual CPUs and 3,072 GiB of memory; these are instance specifications, not GPU capacity.

The VM portfolio has two types with seven shapes each: highmem-standardlssd provides 219 GiB of local SSD storage per virtual CPU, while highmem-highlssd provides 438 GiB per virtual CPU. Google positions the former for analytics and SQL databases such as MySQL and Postgres, and the latter for distributed databases, streaming, large parallel file systems and search.

Google reports up to 15,600K random-read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 75,600 MiB/s sequential-read throughput. Against Z3, it claims up to 70% higher local-storage performance, 25% lower write latency, 30% higher mixed read/write IOPS without increased input/output latency, and up to 40% better performance for the demanding workloads discussed in the announcement.

Bare-metal instances provide direct hardware access without a virtualization layer, supporting custom hypervisors, licensing-sensitive workloads and agentic-AI microVM sandboxes. Google also identifies Z4D bare metal as its first AMD-based instance to support Nutanix Cloud Clusters, while Titanium SSDs offload local-storage processing from CPU resources; all performance comparisons are Google’s published claims.