Plan High Availability for Storage

To achieve high availability and durability of your architecture, you need to follow certain best practices for the storage layer.

Understand Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Storage Services

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a set of storage services you can configure to meet the requirements of a high availability architecture.

These services are:

• Block Volume

  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volumes enables you to dynamically provision and manage block storage volumes. You can create, attach, connect, and move volumes as needed to meet your storage and application requirements. When a volume is attached and connected to an instance, you can use it like a regular hard drive. Volumes can also be disconnected and attached to another Compute instance while the data on the volume is maintained.

• Object Storage

  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage is an internet-scale, high-performance storage platform that offers reliable and cost-efficient data durability. The Object Storage service can store an unlimited amount of unstructured data of any content type, including analytic data and rich content, like images and videos. Object Storage is a regional service and is available across all the availability domains within a region. Data is stored redundantly across multiple storage servers and across multiple availability domains.

• File Storage

  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure File Storage provides a durable, scalable, distributed, enterprise-grade network file system. You can connect to a File Storage file system from any bare metal, virtual machine, or container instance in your Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). You can also access a file system from outside the VCN by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect and IPSec VPNs. Large Compute clusters of thousands of instances can use File Storage for high-performance shared storage, and it provides redundant storage for resilient data protection.

Understand Best Practices for the Storage Layer

To achieve high availability and durability for your architecture, you should follow these best practices when configuring your storage layer.

• Use Object Storage to back up application data. Data is stored redundantly across multiple storage servers across multiple availability domains. Data integrity is actively monitored by using checksums, and corrupt data is detected and automatically repaired. Any loss in data redundancy is automatically detected and corrected, without any customer impact.
• Use Block Volume policy-based backups to perform automatic, scheduled backups and retain them based on a backup policy. Consistently backing up your data allows you to adhere to your data compliance and regulatory requirements.
• If you need an immediate, point-in-time, direct disk-to-disk copy of your block volume, use the Block Volume cloning feature. Volume cloning is different than snapshots because there is no copy-on-write or dependency to the source volume. No backup is involved. The clone operation is immediate, and the cloned volume becomes available for use right after the clone operation is initiated. You can attach and use the cloned volume as a regular volume as soon as its state changes to available.
• If you need to safeguard data against accidental or malicious modifications by an untested or untrusted application, use a block volume with a read-only attachment. A read-only attachment marks a volume as read-only, so the data in the volume is not mutable. You can also use read-only attachments when you have multiple Compute instances that access the same volume for read-only purposes. For example, the instances might be running a web front end that serves static product catalog information to clients.
• When your workload requires highly available shared storage with file semantics, and you need built-in encryption and snapshots for data protection, use File Storage. File Storage uses the industry-standard Network File System (NFS) file access protocol and can be accessed concurrently by thousands of Compute instances. File Storage can provide high-performance and resilient data protection for your applications. The File Storage service runs locally within one availability domain. Within an availability domain, File Storage uses synchronous replication and high availability failover to keep your data safe and available.
• If your application needs high availability across multiple availability domains, use GlusterFS on top of the Block Volume service.
• Plan and size your storage capacity by considering future growth needs.