OCI Block Storage

Block Storage

Local Storage

• NVMe SSD based temporary storage that survives reboots.

• Can be used for workloads that have high performance requirements.

• Locally attached SSDs are not protected and the customer is responsible for the durability of the SSDs.

• Protecting NVMe SSD Devices: RAID1, RAID10, RAID6

Block Volume Service

• Stores data independently and beyond the lifespan of compute instances.

• Operates as a raw storage device using protocols such as iSCSI

• Can be attached as

  • iSCSI - requires additional comands on the host

  • Paravirtualzied - directly attached to the host but less performance

• Block volumes are used to expand an instance's storage

• Up to 32 attachments/instace

• Data is encrypted at rest and in transit

• Elastic Performnce

  • Low cost - not available for boot volumes

  • Balanced - default

  • High Performanc

• Can be resized (increasd only) offline (must be de-attached first) but you can also clone to a larger volume or restore from a backup to a larger volume.

Backup and Restore

• Backups are snapshots of block volumes.

• The backups are stored in the regional Object Storage, but they can be copied from one region to another.

• Restores can be performed to any new AD in the region.

• Backups can be performed:

  • On demand: full or incremental

  • Automatically using a policy:

    • Bronze: Monthly incremental backups retained for 12 months + full yearly backup retained for 5 years

    • Silver: Bronze + weekly incremental backup retained for 4 weeks

    • Gold: Silver + daily incremental backup retained for seven days

Cloning

• Cloning allows copying an entire block volume to a new volume.

• Clones cannot be copied to another region

Volume Groups

Group volumes from multiple compartments accross mulitple compute instances in a volume group. You can use groups to perform backup/clones to multiple volumes at a time. Think about backing up the volumes of all instances in a multi-tier application at the same time.

This is available for boot volumes as well, since they are just another type of Block Storage.