Considerations for Storage
To understand the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure storage options, it's important to define the following storage characteristics: performance, durability, availability, scalability, elasticity, security, and access method.
- Performance describes the combination of throughput, bandwidth, and latency.
- Durability ensures that the data is saved and not susceptible to loss or erasure during a crash.
- Availability of the service describes how the storage service is built within the availability domains to ensure access to the data.
- Scalability and elasticity describe how easy it is to grow or shrink data while being able to move the data between compute systems.
- Security describes how data is secured from unauthorized access.
- Access method describes how customers can access data across the different storage offerings.
Storage Characteristics | File | Block | NVMe | Object | Archive |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Performance | Good | Better | Best | Good | Cold Line |
Durability | Across availability domains | Across availability domains | Locally Managed | Regional | Across regions |
Availability | High | High | Locally Managed | High | Persistent |
Scalability | High | High | Static | High | High |
Elasticity | Automatic | Dynamic | Static | Automatic | Automatic |
Security | Shared | Shared | Individual Host | Shared | Shared |
Access Method | Network | Dedicated | Direct | HTTPS | HTTPS |
File Storage
- General Purpose FileStorage: Access to an unlimited pool of file systems to manage growth of structured and unstructured data.
- Big Data and Analytics: Run analytic workloads and use shared file systems to store persistent data.
- Lift and Shift of Enterprise Applications: Migrate existing Oracle applications that need NFS storage, such as Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft.
- Databases and Transactional Applications: Run test and development workloads with Oracle, MySQL, or other databases.
- Backups, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery: Host a secondary copy of relevant file systems from on-premises to the cloud for backup and disaster recovery purposes.
- MicroServices and Docker: Deliver stateful persistence for containers. Easily scale as your container-based environments grow.
If NFS files are used in the on-premises data center, then moving to File Storage can be simple and direct. If there is a reliance on Microsoft Windows Server, use the NFS client to attach the NFS shares to the Windows Server hosts.
Block Volume
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volumes service lets you expand your current storage footprint. It provides persistent storage that can move between instances within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Volumes work with both bare metal and virtual machine (VM) instances, and they are attached via iSCSI for data volumes or paravirtualized
Block Volume lets an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure user create, attach, connect, and move volumes as needed to meet application storage requirements. After you attach a volume to an instance, the volume behaves like a standard hard drive. Volumes can also be disconnected and attached to another instance without the loss of data, thus allowing for easy moment of data between instances as requirements change.
- Instance: A bare metal or VM host running in the cloud.
- Volume attachment: One of the following types:
- iSCSI: A TCP/IP-based standard used for communication between a volume and attached instance.
- Paravirtualized: A virtualized attachment available for VMs.
- Volume: One of the following types:
- Block volume: A detachable block storage device that lets you dynamically expand the storage capacity of an instance.
- Boot volume: A detachable boot volume device that contains the image used to boot a Compute instance.
Block volumes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are a great performance option and provide flexible configuration for HDFS capacity. Block volumes are a network attached storage, and as such they use VNIC bandwidth for I/O. Block volumes also scale in IOPS and MB/s based on their configured size (per GB). Individual block volume throughput maxes out at 320 MB/s for 700GB or larger volumes.
NVMe Devices
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides locally attached NVMe devices in some specific compute shapes. These devices provide extremely low-latency, high-performance block storage that is ideal for big data, OLTP, and any other workload that can benefit from high-performance block storage.
Note that these devices are not protected in any way; they are individual devices locally installed on your instance. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure does not take images, back up, or use RAID or any other methods to protect the data on NVMe devices. These devices are not automatically protected and require the proper RAID configuration to protect the data on them.
Object Storage
Use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage for data to which you need fast, immediate, and frequent access. Data accessibility and performance justifies a higher price point to store data in the Object Storage tier.
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.
With Object Storage, you can safely and securely store or retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. Object Storage is a regional service and is not tied to any specific compute instance. You can access data from anywhere inside or outside the context of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as long you have internet connectivity and can access one of the Object Storage endpoints. Object Storage also supports private access from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources in a VCN through a service gateway. A service gateway allows connectivity to the Object Storage public endpoints from private IP addresses in private subnets.
- Hadoop/Big Data Support - You can use Object Storage as the primary data repository for big data. Object Storage offers a scalable storage platform that lets you store large datasets and operate seamlessly on those datasets.
- Backup/Archive - You can use Object Storage to preserve backup and archive data that must be stored for an extended duration to adhere to various compliance mandates.
- Content Repository - You can use Object Storage as your primary content repository for data, images, logs, and video.
- Log Data - You can use Object Storage to preserve application log data so that you can retroactively analyze this data to determine usage pattern and debug issues.
- Large Datasets - You can use Object Storage to store generated application data that needs to be preserved for future use. Pharmaceutical trials data, genome data, and Internet of Things (IoT) data are examples of generated application data that you can preserve using Object Storage.
Archive Storage
Use Archive Storage for data to which you seldom or rarely access, but that must be retained and preserved for long periods of time. The cost efficiency of the Archive Storage tier offsets the long lead time required to access the data.
- Compliance and audit mandates
- Retroactively analyzing log data to determine usage pattern or debug problems
- Historical or infrequently accessed content repository data
- Application-generated data requiring archival for future analysis or legal purposes
Unlike Object Storage, Archive Storage data retrieval is not instantaneous.