Mohammed NaserThere are three types of cloud storage solutions available – object storage, file storage, and block storage. Here is a glance at them.
The various types of cloud storage solutions come under the various cloud services offered by a cloud provider. They are becoming increasingly popular as businesses shift from traditional storage solutions and remote work becomes more common.
3 Types of Cloud Storage
Fundamentally, there are three types of cloud storage solutions available for businesses – object storage, file storage, and block storage. Here is a glance at each of them.
Object Storage
Object storage came into the IT industry in the 1990s when high-performance computing researchers needed scalable options for their massive data sets. Moreover, the growing, scalable cloud services lead to the popularity of object storage in the market.
As a flexible storage solution, object storage allows any data for the desired duration, facilitates easy retrieval of data, and is ideal for unstructured data, binary, or blobs. It adapts to frequent component failures of systems via continual monitoring, fault tolerance error detection, automatic recovery. Object storage can accommodate massive data sets and files.
Since object storage is highly scalable, distributed, and more efficient. Furthermore, modern object storage is adapting to new technology. The several use cases for object storage include data lakes, metadata, backup and archival systems, data analytics, machine, and deep learning, source code management, disaster recovery, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, websites, and documentation. As mentioned earlier, it is an uber-flexible type of cloud storage.
File Storage
As the name indicates, in file storage, the data is stored in files. These files are then sorted and set up in folders arranged into directories, subdirectories, and more. Files in file storage are generally easy to name, delete, or customize sans additional interfaces. As a fully managed network-attached storage solution, it is ideal for unstructured data/shared file storage.
One of the significant advantages of file storage is its approachability. There are also other vital elements worth noting - for instance, file storage facilitates sharing and collaboration.Common uses for file storage are storage for office directories in content repositories, application migration, media processing, machine learning, and data storage that need data protection and easy deployment capabilities.
Block Storage
Many cloud enterprise workloads are currently run using block storage. In this type of cloud storage, data is divided into sections called blocks and stored in a system that can be physically distributed. Each block has a unique identifier, allowing the system to track and assemble them as needed.
As an integrated storage solution, block storage facilitates integration with Compute Engine and GKE. It also has low latency and high performance and is Ideal for VMs and stateless workloads. A block storage system is used in cases where quick retrieval and manipulation of data are needed. Some use cases include VM disks, scale-out analytics, media rendering, database storage, and flash-optimized databases.
Cloud Storage with VEXXHOST
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