What businesses benefit most from block storage?
Block storage is a great tool for businesses with data that doesn’t need specific metadata attached to it. For these businesses, block storage makes it easy to move around data as needed.
Block Storage
Block Storage Overview
Block Storage Products
(1-22 of 22) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Customer Verified
Top Rated
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is Oracles's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform which combines the utility of public cloud with the granular control, security, and predictability of on-premises infrastructure.
Key Features
- Dynamic scaling (72)88%8.8
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (73)86%8.6
- Operating system support (73)83%8.3
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Customer Verified
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) from AWS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases…
IBM Cloud Block Storage
Customer Verified
IBM offers their Block Storage service via IBM Cloud, allowing users to deploy and customize flash-backed iSCSI block storage from 25 GB to 12,000 GB capacity with up to 48,000 IOPS.
Google's Persistent Disk service on Google Cloud is designed to present reliable, high-performance block storage for virtual machine instances.
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
Microsoft's Managed Disks service on Azure are the company's recommended disk storage offering for use with Azure virtual machines for persistent storage of data.
Vultr in Matawan provides a variety of storage as a service solutions, including the Vultr Block Storage service.
Tencent Cloud offers a suite of storage solutions, including block storage, object storage, file storage, and a cloud log service that provides log collection, search and analysis.
SUSE Enterprise Storage is a software defined storage option from German company SUSE.
Huawei's FusionStorage is a distributed storage system that provides block, object, big data, and file storage for upper-layer applications.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) offers their SFA line of high density block storage solutions, including the SFA14KX and the SFA18K.
OVHcloud Public Cloud offers users a large number of cloud solutions that are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. OVH states their infrastructure is set up in a simple way to enable businesses to harness the flexibility of on-demand resources to scale up from small projects to large-…
StarWind SAN & NAS is an HCL-certified software-defined shared storage for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The solution also enables the user to repurpose servers into certified backup targets if they are using Veeam. StarWind SAN & NAS, as a Linux-based VM, leverages…
IBM Spectrum Accelerate is an enterprise software defined block storage solution.
Rackspace Cloud Block Storage is designed to present reliable, high-performance, on-demand storage for applications hosted on Cloud Servers.
Stratoscale Block Storage is native block storage, designed to be extremely scalable, agile and flexible, while fully compatible with the requirements of cloud computing.
The AWS Snow Family is a collection of physical devices that help migrate large amounts of data into and out of the cloud without depending on networks. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing and data transfer devices, presented as portable,…
Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.
Elastic Volume Service (EVS), from Huawei Cloud, provides durable block storage for cloud servers such as Elastic Cloud Servers (ECS) and Bare Metal Servers (BMS). EVS offers 99.9999999% durability and as little as 1 millisecond of read/write latency for a broad range of mission-…
Learn More About Block Storage
What is Block Storage?
Block storage is a data storage type where data is kept in volumes, or "blocks," acting as individual drives. These blocks can be configured and moved around a storage area network (SAN). It is the most common type of storage used for applications, RAID arrays, and virtual machines. Block storage systems lack metadata but are familiar and easy to work with, performant, and can be used across distributed systems, at a relatively low loss to efficiency.
Block-level storage is commonly associated with and managed within storage area networks (SANs). It is distinguished from object storage, where data is stored with customizable metadata and tags which describe the data. Block storage is supplied by cloud service vendors providing IaaS. It may be available as an add-on to a product or available standalone for any purpose. Vendors offer inbuilt security for block storage services, such as data encryption, restricted (e.g. read only) access, and may offer performance and access SLAs. Pricing may be dynamic (e.g. pay-as-you-go), or packaged, depending on the vendor.
Features & Capabilities
Below are some of the most common features associated with block storage solutions:
Volumized storage
Individual block level management
Cloud Access
High Efficiency
Pricing
Block storage pricing is typically handled via either a pay-as-you-go model based on your usage, or is bundled in with pricing of a larger cloud service. Businesses can also expect to pay more for features like quick scalability or low latency. Many services also charge by IOPS.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use block storage solutions in conjunction with other storage options?
Businesses that have some storage needs that require specific metadata in addition to other storage needs can benefit from using block storage in conjunction with other storage solutions.
Are there any free or open source Block Storage Solutions?
There are no fully featured free block storage options. There are some block storage solutions that offer free trials, but businesses should expect to pay for most block storage features.