Google Cloud announced general availability of its storage-optimized Z4M series on November 6, offering both virtual machines and bare-metal instances in selected regions. The launch post positions the machines for AI checkpoints, distributed key-value caches and parallel file systems, with up to 168,000 GiB of Local SSD and up to 400 Gbps networking.

For an infrastructure team, the operational detail worth examining is maintenance. Google's machine-family documentation says live migration is supported only with 42,000 GiB or less of attached Titanium SSD. It also says enabling Cloud RDMA prevents live migration: the instance must use a termination policy for host maintenance, with local SSD data persistence.

My reading is that the storage service's maintenance plan should be evaluated alongside its performance.…