What is Block Storage?

Note: Pricing and product information are correct as of July 29, 2024, and subject to change

When building products for customers, developers often have complex storage needs. A content management system might require space for website templates, user-uploaded images, and customer account details. A video streaming service could need storage for its content library, user watch histories, and recommendation algorithms.

But storage solutions aren’t one-size-fits-all.

File storage works well for organizing documents, but it’s not ideal for high-speed database operations. Object storage excels at handling large media files but falls short for applications needing frequent small updates. Block storage fills an important niche, offering flexibility for tasks like running virtual machines, hosting databases, and supporting high-performance applications. In this article, we’ll explore block storage’s capabilities, benefits and how it compares to other storage types.

Summary

1. Block storage is a type of data storage where data is divided into fixed-size blocks, each assigned a unique address. This allows for quick access and high performance, making it suitable for transactional and mission-critical applications.

2. Block storage offers high scalability, faster data access, and reliable data protection. It is ideal for enterprise databases, virtual machine storage, high-performance computing, and backup and disaster recovery strategies.

3. DigitalOcean’s Volumes Block Storage, powered by Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology, provides high-performance, low-latency storage with strong input/output operations per second (IOPS). It supports critical workloads, ensures data security with encryption and redundancy, and offers seamless scalability with transparent and affordable pricing.

What is Block storage?

Block storage is a type of data storage in which information is divided into fixed-size blocks and written to a storage device. Each block is assigned a unique address, allowing the system to quickly locate and access specific data blocks.

How does block storage work?

Block storage operates by dividing data into fixed-size blocks. These data blocks are then stored independently on one or more physical storage devices, such as HDDs or SSDs.

• Data is divided into fixed-size blocks, typically ranging from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes (Some storage systems may support variable block sizes or dynamically adjust block sizes based on the workload and data characteristics.

• Each data block is assigned a unique logical block address (LBA)

• The storage system uses these LBAs to locate and retrieve specific data blocks as needed quickly

• Block storage provides random access to data, allowing any individual block to be read or written independently

• The physical storage devices (e.g., HDDs, SSDs) are abstracted away, and a pool of storage capacity is presented to the host system

• The host system can then partition and format the storage pool as needed, creating logical storage volumes

• Block storage systems often incorporate redundancy mechanisms, such as RAID configurations, to protect against data loss in the event of individual disk failures

• Advanced storage management features, like snapshots, cloning, and thin provisioning, are offered to optimize storage resources

Benefits of block storage

Block storage provides flexibility in managing and scaling storage volumes, allowing users to allocate and reallocate storage as needed. Apart from offering high performance and low latency, there are many benefits of using block storage:

Scalable storage capacity and management

Block storage can scale to accommodate growing data needs by adding more storage devices or expanding existing ones. This allows organizations to adapt their storage capacity as their requirements change. Block storage systems typically offer advanced management capabilities, such as snapshots, cloning, and thin provisioning, which simplify storage administration and improve efficiency.

Faster data access

The random access nature of block storage enables quick retrieval of specific data blocks, resulting in faster read and write speeds than file-based storage, particularly for workloads with many small, random I/O operations.

Reliable and redundant data protection

Block storage systems often incorporate features like redundancy, mirroring, and parity data to protect against data loss during hardware failures. This ensures high availability and data integrity.

Versatile and flexible integration

Block storage can be easily integrated with various applications and databases, providing a versatile storage solution that can be optimized for different workloads and usage patterns. This flexibility allows organizations to use block storage for various use cases, from supporting mission-critical databases to enabling efficient virtual machine deployments. Additionally, block storage can be integrated with virtualization and cloud computing, expanding the deployment options available to IT teams.

Use cases of block storage

Block storage is ideal for transactional, mission-critical, and I/O-intensive applications. It’s frequently used for relational and transactional databases, time series databases, containers, boot disks, and hypervisor file systems.

Enterprise-grade databases

Block storage is the underlying infrastructure for enterprise-grade databases, such as SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. Its random access and high-performance characteristics make it well-suited to handle the demanding I/O patterns and data integrity requirements of these mission-critical database workloads.

Virtual machine storage

In virtualized environments, block storage is commonly used to store virtual machine (VM) disks. Its block-level access and advanced management features enable efficient provisioning, cloning, and migration of VMs and integration with hypervisor technologies.

High-performance computing (HPC)

HPC workloads, such as scientific simulations, computational fluid dynamics, and financial modeling, require fast and reliable storage to handle the high-throughput and low-latency requirements. Block storage, often in the form of SAN or cloud-based block storage services, can provide the necessary performance and scalability for these demanding HPC applications.

Backup and disaster recovery

Block storage systems can be a foundation for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies. Features like snapshot capabilities, replication, and remote mirroring enable organizations to protect their critical data and ensure business continuity during data loss or system failures.

Other types of storage

By carefully evaluating specific workload requirements, cloud engineers can use block, file, and object storage’s unique strengths to build highly efficient and optimized cloud infrastructures.

File storage

File storage, also known as network-attached storage (NAS), organizes data into a hierarchical file system structure, similar to how data is stored on a local hard drive. Files are accessed using file paths and directory structures rather than LBAs used in block storage. NAS systems, such as those based on the Network File System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB) protocols, allow multiple clients to access shared files over a network.

Comparison with block storage

Block storage is optimized for performance and direct access to data, making it well-suited for applications with high-throughput and low-latency requirements, such as databases and virtualized environments. In contrast, file storage is generally better suited for scenarios where multiple users or applications must access and share unstructured data, such as documents, images, and media files.

Object storage

Object storage manages data as discrete units called objects. Each object contains the data, associated metadata, and a unique identifier. Object storage is used for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as images, videos, and backups, and is commonly found in cloud-based storage services.

Comparison with block storage

While block storage is optimized for low-latency, high-performance applications, object storage is designed to handle large volumes of unstructured data with high scalability and durability. Object storage systems provide scalability, fault tolerance, and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional block or file storage, making them well-suited for applications like content delivery, data archiving, and big data analytics. When comparing block storage vs object storage, object storage may not offer the same level of performance and random access capabilities as block storage for workloads that require frequent, low-latency data access.

Empower your developers with scalable DigitalOcean block storage

DigitalOcean’s Volumes Block Storage is the business-ready solution that will transform your infrastructure and drive your cloud business’ success. Built on the latest NVMe technology, this high-performance block storage offering delivers speed, reliability, and scalability to power your most demanding applications.

BASAibu is an organization in Indonesia that operates a multilingual cultural wiki that enables communities to speak out about civic issues using their local languages freely. BASAibu has hosted its wiki using DigitalOcean’s Droplets and Volumes Block Storage. With DigitalOcean’s support, they could scale to 4 million users easily. Here’s what they had to say:

• Integrate your Droplets with DigitalOcean’s Volumes Block Storage for steady performance. The block storage offers low latency, high throughput, and strong input/output operations per second (IOPS) to support your key workloads, whether that’s hosting databases, running machine learning models, or serving web applications.

• Safeguard your data with DigitalOcean’s security and availability features. Your data is always encrypted at rest and during replication, ensuring the highest levels of protection. With a 99.99% uptime SLA, you can trust that your critical information is highly available and resilient, even in the face of hardware failures.

Pricing

DigitalOcean’s Volumes Block Storage offers transparent and affordable pricing, allowing businesses to scale their storage. The pricing is straightforward, allowing customers to plan their infrastructure costs effectively:

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