Hi there, and thanks so much for joining us today.
My name is Bradley Knapp and I'm with IBM.
And the question we're answering today is what is box storage versus file storage?
So this is a pretty intro and basic level question.
I'm glad you guys came to learn the difference
because when you're talking about cloud computing, these are far and away the two most commonly used kinds of storage.
And so to start off, we're going to get our block over here
and then we're going to put our file over here.
And let's talk about the difference between these two, because this difference is really important.
They are two different kinds of storage.
The way that they present is different.
The underlying technologies is different,
but most importantly, they have specific uses that make them very, very distinct.
So let's start over here with Block.
Let's get into that one first.
So if we think about block storage
on the underlying layer, if we think about the physical devices that the data is stored on,
when you write out to a block volume, you're going to write a file out.
That file is going to get broken up into lots of independent parts.
And each of those independent parts is going to go onto that storage device.
Now what makes Block really useful as a storage media
is each of these different parts can be moved around for efficiency's sake.
So you can move them around on a single disk.
You can move them around on arrays of disks
or in the case of cloud storage, where we have entire clusters of physical hardware,
you can move these things around to wherever they need to be.
That's the "block" part.
Now, when it comes time to mount this block device to your virtual machine,
that's where things get really interesting, right?
So over here, I've got my VSI, my virtual server, and to my VSI, I want to attach storage right?
I have to have something to run my operating system off of.
I have to have storage to store the data that is being processed.
I have to have storage in order to store my backups.
And so a block device can actually be mounted to this virtual server in two different ways.
The first is it can be mounted directly via a mount point, M N T.
So via mount point.
So when you order a block device, you're going to get a little mount point that goes along with it.
It can be mounted to your virtual server using Windows or Linux.
Whatever your preference is.
You just put in the address, the proper security information, and you can mount it and then you can start using it.
Have to apply a file system, obviously, but away you go.
In addition to that, during the provisioning process, so when this virtual server is being provisioned,
we can have a block device that gets mounted up here into the hypervisor layer.
And it acts, looks and feels just like it was a physical disk that's mounted into the machine.
Now, big difference here: if you're talking about a block device that is mounted directly to the virtual server,
you can unmount it and mount it to another virtual server over here.
So let's say that, alright I've written a bunch of data out to it, and I don't want it attached to that one anymore.
I'm going to spin up a second VSI.
I'm going to put an X over that bad boy, and I'm now going to mount it to my new virtual server.
Let that new virtual server work on all of the data that's in there.
Let me give you another use case for it.
Let's imagine that I have a virtual server that is doing a bunch of processing information, and it's writing that out.
So let's put that bad boy over here, V S I, and I have a block device that is mounted to it.
And so my virtual server here, it's doing lots of processing, right, it's preparing data sets, data analytics, maybe.
But it is only doing all of the processing, it's not actually serving that data out to anybody else.
Let's say that I have four more VSIs that are over here.
Those are the ones that are going to serve this data out.
And so what they can do is each of them can mount this block device, but mount it read-only,
and so when you've mounted this thing read-only you don't have to worry about data corruption or anything like that
because all they can do is read from it,
but they can get access to it in real time and so they can bring down the latest information.
So block device: probably the most commonly used storage in cloud.
Now let's talk for a minute about file.
File storage is the other most commonly used storage, and the big difference between file and block
- so remember I said block whenever we write out, we write out all these little bits, right?
There's some metadata that goes along with them, but not just a ton.
Mainly, it's the job of the operating system in that virtual server to provide you all of the other information.
File stores, on the other hand, or a file share,
maintains the directory hierarchy in the same way that you think about it in displayed at the operating system layer.
So if I have a file share here inside that file share, I'm going to have folders.
And inside those folders, I'm going to have files.
Just like if I was looking at any other kind of a storage device on a local machine,
but it is native to this actual storage media itself.
The media maintains this logical hierarchy and maintains the metadata that goes along with that hierarchy.
So, whenever I mount an NFS share, I can do interesting things like collaboration.
Remember over here, in order to maintain file integrity, we had to lock the entire volume and make it read-only.
Well, file is not quite that inflexible.
File, you have the ability because you have all of the metadata in it and you're maintaining that hierarchy,
you can lock individual files within a file share.
So over here, we have that example.
So, now let's get our VSI, and we are going to mount a file share,
and we're going to call this one "M N T F" for file.
Now let's imagine that I have a bunch of laptops, right?
So my users have a network share in the office that they use.
And so I've got, oh, I don't know, two different laptops, right?
And each of these laptops is accessing files that are stored on this central directory.
So Laptop #1 can go out and access it, read it, make changes, whatever.
It's locked only while it's being written to.
Laptop #2 can do the same thing.
You know it's locked only while it's being written to.
Now you always run into the issue of potential data integrity errors in that you'll get out of sync.
Right.
So what what one machine is seeing may not be sync'ed up with what another machine is synching,
but you probably won't corrupt and kill the file the way you would have five or ten years ago.
Now, another place that file storage is kind of nifty is it can be performance adjusted to be pretty fast.
And so if you're talking about storing a structured backup file, so rather than just a single backup file that has the integrity within it,
maybe you've got a bunch of backup files that you know that you need to maintain in a specific series of folders
in order for your rewrite to happen correctly, or your restore to happen correctly.
That is going to be better stored in file storage than it is in block storage.
Because again, with file, you're just going to take, you're going to mount it to your virtual server,
and then your backup software can pick up that logical hierarchy and start your restoration.
So file storage, block storage.
Both are mounted at the operating machine, or at the virtual server level, at the OS level.
The big difference there is remember block can also be mounted up at the hypervisor level.
File storage cannot.
You cannot boot from a file share, right?
File is purely for storing, whereas block is both bootable and used for file storage itself.
So, that's the big difference between the two.
Let's talk about practical applications.
Block storage.
You can boot from it, right?
Your operating system can run on it.
A database.
You're always going to want to put a traditional database and a relational database in the block storage.
You do not want to store that on file storage.
You're going to have all kinds of issues when you try and do that because the inherent chunking ability of that block storage
is going to make it much easier to tweak and get higher performance out of.
So these block volumes, obviously you can adjust the performance,
and every cloud provider is going to give you the ability to have low performing, medium performing, high performing, ultra high performing.
But they are going to adjust your ability to do, to have as much performance as you need.
File storage.
Again, same idea, you can adjust the amount of performance that you need,
but you can't dial the knobs quite as neatly as you can on the block side.
So again, block, you're going to put your databases on their operating system boot images,
data that is write-once-read-many times, it's going to go right there.
File.
File is great for mounting to many devices, right - 16, 32, 50 or 100 devices at once.
It maintains that hierarchy, so it's really useful for traditional shares.
And when it comes to access control, you know, it can inherit user directory permissions and things like that,
so that certain users are only authorized to see certain folders within the construct.
Other places that you might use file.
Oh, let's see.
You could use file storage for documents.
You can use it for videos.
You can use it for collaboration.
Let's imagine CAD files, all right.
So Computer Aided Design files.
You're an architect or you're some sort of a machine designer, you're an engineer.
You're working on these big, huge CAD documents.
You're going to want to store those CAD files into a file share.
That way, you can share that out because you again, just like our example down here,
you've got many users that need to access it and make changes, and most CAD software is pretty clever now.
And so you don't have to worry about running into data conflicts as you're doing that.
So that's an overview of Block versus File.
It's why you would use one versus the other.
They're both incredibly important to in the world of cloud and hopefully you find it helpful.
Thank you so much for your time today.
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