hey guys my name is Amy blam on the
offering team here with IBM cloud and
today I want to talk to you about some
traditional types of storage file and
block storage kind of give you an
overview of what they are and then give
you some tips on how to decide when to
use one over the other so let's get
started with block storage block storage
is storage where data is written and raw
blocks on the storage and it's accessed
by the servers that you have through a
storage area network so you have all of
your servers they can either be on the
same network with each other and a
different network but they all connect
through the storage through this storage
area network now some of the advantages
of using block storage is that block
storage provides the lowest possible
latency for your applications and you
can also use it for those applications
that require high performance or lots of
AI ops another thing you'll find with
block storage is that in general it is
highly redundant most block storage
services provide a capability that's
built-in where your data is redundant
across the volume so that if so there
should be either a volume should go down
or a disk should go away and you can
recover your data from another place
without having any kind of impact to
your application now file storage is
connected to your service a little
differently than block storages
everything is connected on the same
network so you have all of your files or
your file share here those are all files
and they can all be accessed on the same
network by any of the servers on that
network so it's network attached storage
file storage is highly scalable so you
can have a multiple file shares on your
network and have all of your servers
attached to that at one time it's
accessible to multiple runtime so here
in this illustration we have a single
file share that has multiple servers
accessing it all at once and you can
also have multiple simultaneous reads
and writes going to
your file share all at one time without
having to worry about your data being
overwritten so how do you know when is
the right time to choose either block
storage or file storage for your
application
well first of all you need to think
about what you're using it for so for
example let's say you have a VMware
configuration where you have multiple
virtual servers with VMware on them and
you need boot volumes well in that case
you would use block storage if you have
workloads such as transactional
databases or relational databases that
require very low latency and high
performance you would choose block
storage in situations where you have a
mix of structured and unstructured data
for example a web hosting server where
you have both you know text files as
well as media files then you would
choose file storage and then if you have
a collaborative space where you need to
have multiple users accessing it all at
one time working together doing you know
reads and writes all at the same time
you would choose a file storage so like
I mentioned in the beginning block and
file storage are very traditional types
of storage they're not as flashy and
sunshiny and exciting as some of the new
storage services that have entered the
market but they are still very relevant
and useful for the different types of
workloads that you have whether it's on
premise or in the cloud thanks for
checking out this video and the
differences between file and block
storage with me today and if you have
any questions or comments or ideas for
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