Cloud Block Storage
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Performance, Reliability, and Redundancy with the Freedom to Scale
Data volumes are growing at an ever-increasing rate, requiring a storage solution that delivers scalability, reliability, and availability at a cost-effective price. M5 cloud-based block storage delivers high availability, high speed, and on-demand storage for websites, databases, and the most resource-intensive applications hosted in a fully managed, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment.
Persistent Block Storage
Capacity Plus Performance
Mission critical applications, databases and other high transaction workloads requiring a large number of IOPS and low latency can benefit from block storage with high capacity and performance combined.
High Availability
High Availability storage gives you redundancy at each and every point – from the power and storage hardware all the way through the network to the hypervisor.
Scalability and Flexibility
dd additional block storage whenever it’s required without any performance degradation and remove it just as easily. It’s completely up to you. Block storage can also be easily transferred between servers as needed.
M5 Managed Cloud Storage Delivers Scalability, On-Demand Availability, and Peace of Mind
Redundancy Across the Network
M5 block storage runs on fully redundant clusters. Each storage cluster is multi-headed, with internally redundant arrays. All systems have redundant power supplies, network connections, HBAs, and network switches. Even though our world-class data center facilities have industry standard UPS and diesel generator systems, we’ve taken things one step further with additional in-line UPSes for the storage arrays.
Continuous Availability
Why is this set-up better than local storage as is common with VPS providers? M5’s SAN-based storage allows for virtual machines and disks that can be hot-migrated for faster resizing, in advance of maintenance and in response to hardware failures. This translates to absolutely no down-time for you when we’re doing scheduled hardware maintenance, and very little downtime when a catastrophic hardware failure occurs. These issues may cause downtime for typical VPS providers.
Future-Proofed Technology
M5 block storage is based on ZFS, taking advantage of all the performance features that can be added to a ZFS system. The host systems have lots of RAM and the storage arrays are configured with many mirrors. We use mirrors of S-TEC Zeus RAM for the ZIL, and many S-TEC SSDs for the L2ARC. The storage hosts run the fastest cores available in Intel’s Xeon E5 series for fast compression. Compression allows for fewer IO operations and increases IO performance in trade for CPU power.
High Speed Storage
Our Primary Storage is connected to the storage network by multiple, bonded, 10GigE connections to multiple switches, in a fabric configuration. This means that if there is a failure of one network component in the data path, then the effective bandwidth is reduced, but there is no delay for fail-over (no spanning tree protocol). We have engineered the storage network with enough bandwidth to make sure that even in a degraded state, there is plenty available for the affected host, cluster, pod, or Availability Zone.
Get started with fully managed block storage.
Most Common Uses for Cloud Block Storage
Most Common Uses for
Cloud Block Storage
Are you continually outgrowing the available space on your server? Cloud storage provides a separate storage environment which can be expanded on-demand as needed. There’s no need to buy additional hardware that may sit unused for long periods of time.
Centralized Storage Across
Multiple Servers
The ability to centralize storage and make data available across multiple servers enables you to easily share data, synchronize content, and achieve stricter controls over versioning and security. It also ensures ease of configuration, improved capacity, and increased performance.