Flexible Block Storage
Nobus FBS Volume Types
The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation FBS volumes:
| Solid State Drives (SSD) | Hard Disk Drives (HDD) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume Type | FBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) | FBS General Purpose SSD (gp2)* | Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) | Cold HDD (sc1) |
Short Description | Highest performance SSD volume designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads | General Purpose SSD volume that balances price performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads | Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads | Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads |
Use Cases | I/O-intensive NoSQL and relational databases | Boot volumes, low-latency interactive apps, dev & test | Big data, data warehouses, log processing | Colder data requiring fewer scans per day |
API Name | io1 | gp2 | st1 | sc1 |
Volume Size | 4 GB - 16 TB | 1 GB - 16 TB | 500 GB - 16 TB | 500 GB - 16 TB |
Max IOPS**/Volume | 64,000 | 16,000 | 500 | 250 |
Max Throughput**/Volume | 1,000 MB/s | 250 MB/s | 500 MB/s | 250 MB/s |
Max IOPS/Instance | 80,000 | 80,000 | 80,000 | 80,000 |
Max Throughput/Instance | 1,750 MB/s | 1,750 MB/s | 1,750 MB/s | 1,750 MB/s |
Price | $0.125/GB-month $0.065/provisioned IOPS | $0.10/GB-month | $0.045/GB-month | $0.025/GB-month |
Dominant Performance Attribute | IOPS | IOPS | MB/s | MB/s |
SSD-backed volumes (IOPS-intensive)
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes
IO1 is backed by solid-state drives (SSDs) and is the highest performance FBS storage option designed for critical, I/O intensive database and application workloads, as well as throughput-intensive database and data warehouse workloads, such as HBase and Cassandra. These volumes are ideal for both IOPS-intensive and throughput-intensive workloads that require extremely low latency.
IO1 is designed to deliver a consistent baseline performance of up to 50 IOPS/GB to a maximum of 64,000 IOPS and provide up to 1,000 MB/s of throughput per volume1.
Standard SSD (gp2) volumes
GP2 is the default FBS volume type for Nobus FCS instances. These volumes are backed by solid-state drives (SSDs) and are suitable for a broad range of transactional workloads, including dev/test environments, low-latency interactive applications, and boot volumes. GP2 is designed to offer single-digit millisecond latencies, deliver a consistent baseline performance of 3 IOPS/GB (minimum 100 IOPS) to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS, and provide up to 250 MB/s of throughput per volume
GP2 volumes smaller than 1 TB can also burst up to 3,000 IOPS. I/O is included in the price of gp2, so you pay only for each GB of storage you provision. GP2 is designed to deliver the provisioned performance 99% of the time. If you need a greater number of IOPS than gp2 can provide, or if you have a workload where low latency is critical or you need better performance consistency, we recommend that you use io1.
HDD-backed volumes (MB/s-intensive)
Throughput optimized HDD (st1) volumes
ST1 is backed by hard disk drives (HDDs) and is ideal for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads with large datasets and large I/O sizes, such as MapReduce, Kafka, log processing, data warehouse, and ETL workloads. These volumes deliver performance in terms of throughput, measured in MB/s, and include the ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume. ST1 is designed to deliver the expected throughput performance 99% of the time and has enough I/O credits to support a full-volume scan at the burst rate.
Cold HDD (sc1) volumes
SC1 is backed by hard disk drives (HDDs) and provides the lowest cost per GB of all FBS volume types. It is ideal for less frequently accessed workloads with large, cold datasets. Similar to st1, sc1 provides a burst model: these volumes can burst up to 80 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 12 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 250 MB/s per volume. For infrequently accessed data, sc1 provides extremely inexpensive storage. SC1 is designed to deliver the expected throughput performance 99% of the time and has enough I/O credits to support a full-volume scan at the burst rate.
Nobus FBS Flexible Volumes
Flexible Volumes is a feature that allows you to easily adapt your volumes as the needs of your applications change. Flexible Volumes allows you to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume with no downtime or performance impact. Easily right-size your deployment and adapt to performance changes.
Simply create a volume with the capacity and performance needed today knowing you have the ability to modify your volume configuration in the future, saving hours of planning cycles. The Flexible Volumes feature makes it easier to adapt your resources to changing application demands, giving you confidence that you can make modifications in the future as your business needs change.
Nobus FBS Snapshots
Nobus FBS provides the ability to save point-in-time snapshots of your volumes to Nobus FOS. Nobus FBS Snapshots are stored incrementally: only the blocks that have changed after your last snapshot are saved, and you are billed only for the changed blocks. If you have a device with 100 GB of data but only 5 GB has changed after your last snapshot, a subsequent snapshot consumes only 5 additional GB and you are billed only for the additional 5 GB of snapshot storage, even though both the earlier and later snapshots appear complete.
When you delete a snapshot, you remove only the data not needed by any other snapshot. All active snapshots contain all the information needed to restore the volume to the instant at which that snapshot was taken. The time to restore changed data to the working volume is the same for all snapshots.
Snapshots can be used to instantiate multiple new volumes, expand the size of a volume, or move volumes across Availability Zones. When a new volume is created, you may choose to create it based on an existing Nobus FBS snapshot. In that scenario, the new volume begins as an exact replica of the snapshot.
The following are key features of Nobus FBS Snapshots:
Immediate access to Nobus FBS volume data - After a volume is created from a snapshot, there is no need to wait for all of the data to transfer from Nobus S3 to your Nobus FBS volume before your attached instance can start accessing the volume. Nobus FBS Snapshots implement lazy loading, so that you can begin using them right away.
Resizing Nobus FBS volumes - There are two methods that can be used to resize an Nobus FBS volume. If you create a new volume based on a snapshot, you can specify a larger size for the new volume. With the Flexible Volume feature you can dynamically grow live volumes without the use of snapshots. Make certain that your file system and application supports resizing a device.
Sharing Nobus FBS Snapshots - Nobus FBS Snapshots' shareability makes it easy for you to share data with your co-workers or others in the NCS community. Authorized users can create their own Nobus FBS volumes based on your Nobus FBS shared snapshots; your original snapshot remains intact. If you choose, you can also make your data available publicly to all NCS users. For more information about how to share snapshots, see Modifying Snapshot Permissions.
Copying Nobus FBS Snapshots across NCS regions - Nobus FBS's ability to copy snapshots across NCS regions makes it easier to leverage multiple NCS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery. You can copy any snapshot accessible to you: snapshots you created; snapshots shared with you; and snapshots from the NCS Marketplace, VM Import/Export, and NCS Storage Gateway. For more information, see Copying an Nobus FBS Snapshot.
Nobus FBS availability and durability
Nobus FBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. At no additional charge to you, Nobus FBS volume data is replica ted across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component.
Nobus FBS volumes are designed for an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% - 0.2%, where failure refers to a complete or partial loss of the volume, depending on the size and performance of the volume. This makes FBS volumes 20 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives, which fail with an AFR of around 4%. For example, if you have 1,000 FBS volumes running for 1 year, you should expect 1 to 2 will have a failure. FBS also supports a snapshot feature, which is a good way to take point-in-time backups of your data.