hello folk,
Storage is one of the important components in the IT sector where we stored and access the data for long-term purposes. In storage, we have many types like object storage, file storage, and block storage. today we will see the main 2 types of storage with the comparison. so that this will help us to understand the storage types easily. But before that one question arises why we need different types of storage in the industry?
The type of storage decides on the basis of the architecture of the application. Different types of applications need different methods to access the data.
for example: for storing a database of application industry prefer to use block storage whereas to store a backup they can use object storage.
let's start first with Block storage:
Block Storage
In Block storage, data is broken up into pieces called blocks. and it is stored across a system that can be physically distributed. It's like 1 block device maybe your 1 independent raw disk. so that when you plug in it the operating system detects it as a raw disk so you can format that raw disk with any filesystem and start using it as a regular device upon which you can store your data.
The most common example of block storage are ISCSI, SAN, and local disk.
In Block Storage, files are spilt into evenly sized blocks of data, each with its own address but with no additional information i.e metadata to provide more context for what that block of data is.
Block storage option is also available in the cloud. For example AWS Elastic Block Storage(EBS). They also provide raw storage where you can attach your EC2 instance. Once you attached the Ec2 instance to your storage, it creates a file system, and immediately it is ready to access your storage.
In Microsoft Azure, premium Storage delivers high performance, low latency disk running on Azure virtual Machine up to 32Tb of storage.
Why use Block Storage?
Block storage leads to faster performance when the application and storage are local. it is preferred for high performance such as transactional or database applications. Block storage is useful for quickly retrieve and manipulate data.
Let's explore the Use-Cases of Block storage:
- Storage Databases: for storing the structured databases. because it requires constant I/O performance and low latency connectivity.
- Persistent Storage: Block storage detects from cloud instances immediately after they attached.
- ISCSI storage: ISCSI is a block protocol for storage networking. We can share ISCSI block storage through the network.
Advantage of Block Storage:
- High performances and optimized I/O bound
- Highly redundant
- data can be easily recovered through disk fails.
Disadvantage of Block storage:
- Storage is tied to one server at a time
- You need to pay for all the block storage space you’ve allocated, even if you’re not using it
- You can only access block storage through a running server
Object storage:
Object Storage is one of the most recent storage systems. In object storage, storage is presented as an unstructured collection of objects. Each object contains a blob( Binary Large object) of data and a set of metadata, attributes specific to or contextual for the object ("data about the data").
In object storage, every object contains 3 things:
- the data itself: the data can be anything you want to store
- A metadata: the metadata is defined by whoever created that object storage. it contains contextual information about what that data is.
- Unique Identifier: this identifier is a 128-bit unique value given to an object to be found in a distributed system. so because of this it is possible to find data without knowing its physical location.
In cloud object storage option is also available. Let's take the example of Amazon S3. it stores the object within a resource called "buckets". Another example is the Azure Bob storage. For users with a large amount of unstructured data to store in the cloud.
Why to use Object Storage?
Metadata tags are a key advantage with object storage. They allow for much better identification and classification of data. It makes object self-describing.
for unstructured data, object storage is perfect. because it is the only option that can effectively store large data at scale.
let's explore the use-cases of object storage:
- Movies, Music, images: To store these kinds of data, object storage is preferable. for video steaming, object storage is also useful.
- Large Data Sets: Whether you’re storing pharmaceutical or financial data, or multimedia files such as photos and videos, storage can be used as your big data object-store.
Advantage of object storage:
- it is Massively Scalable
- Easily accessible via HTTP requests
- A cost structure that means you only pay for what you use so Billed per usage, no fixed costs or very low entry fee.
- Being able to store chunks of metadata alongside your data blob can further simplify your application architecture
Disadvantage of object Storage:
- high latency than block storage
- Object Storage does not allow the modification of a certain data blob, each object must be read and written completely which may lead to performance issues
- Operating systems can’t easily mount an object store like a normal disk.
so this is all about block storage and object storage with examples. so choosing a storage solution can be a complex decision for developers. In this article, we discussed the advantage and disadvantages of both block and object storage too.
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