In today’s always-on world, your business moves as quickly as your data. Cloud storage, especially elastic and high-performing block volumes, has become a driving force for enabling growth, resilience, and innovation across your organization.
With all the possibilities that cloud brings, you might be wondering how to truly maximize your block storage performance. More importantly, how do you make it fast, reliable, and effortless to manage? Here are practical strategies, customer stories, and proven tips for making the most out of OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) block storage.
Elasticity and Flexibility: Cloud’s biggest storage advantage
Cloud growth is staggering. Gartner estimates over 70% of mission-critical workloads will live in the cloud by 20281. That’s because cloud block volumes don’t make you predict the unpredictable. Cloud block volumes streamline infrastructure planning because they grow and shrink as needed. You don’t have to worry about over-provisioning or running out of space when demand spikes unexpectedly. This flexibility allows your storage to keep pace with the needs of your business without waste or stress.
Striking the right balance with VPUs and volume Size
OCI Block Volumes let you set performance using both volume size and Virtual Performance Units (VPUs). Increasing storage and VPUs can improve speed, but doing so without a plan can waste resources. The most cost-effective approach is to tailor your volume size and VPU count to your true workload needs. However, it need not be for the absolute peak if you rarely see it.
If you use auto-tune, set your VPU minimum to match your regular needs and a maximum that fits what your workload and budget can support. This gives you a safety net for both steady operations and occasional spikes. The other reason why capping VPUs is paramount is to control rogue, malicious or accidental activities that could otherwise shoot up the costs, use up the bandwidth and impact mission critical workloads.
Auto-Tune: Make Storage Work Smarter
Storage growth may be predictable for common workloads. However, predicting storage performance requirements is not straight forward and adapting to your spiky workloads is a tough challenge. Auto-tune makes it easier by automatically adjusting performance levels to match your actual workload.
Your applications get the performance they need exactly when they need it. During quieter times, you save money because extra capacity isn’t just sitting idle. With auto-tune you get a true elastic cloud experience with storage performance. For instance, a video streaming & analytics provider implemented auto-tune and they immediately saved 30 percent in storage costs with no impact to their peak hour workloads.
Multiply performance with multiple volumes
When you need more speed, consider using several block volumes together. Striping them with RAID 0 divides the data across multiple devices, which increases throughput. When a customer was experimenting on OCI, their storage performance by 10X simply by switching from a single volume to a striped configuration. Just remember to make sure your compute shape can handle the desired traffic.
As we discussed before, the performance is driven by the volume size as well. So, the performance saturates beyond a specific volume size based on the VPU setting and it would be worthwhile to distribute the storage on more volumes to maximize the utilization. This can also help lower the VPU setting to minimize cost without losing out on performance.
Don’t overlook your compute resources
To get the best performance, pay attention to your compute instance’s limits on throughput and IOPS. Every compute shape in OCI comes with its own maximum bandwidth. For virtual machines, the bandwidth would be driven by the number of OCPUs you choose. If you configure your block volumes for high performance but hit these compute limits, you won’t see any benefit until you upgrade your instance.
Choosing between Paravirtualized and iSCSI Attachments
For most use cases, paravirtualized attachment is a great option. They are simple to set up and easy to automate. After you attach a volume using the paravirtualized attachment type, it is ready to use, and you do not need to run any additional commands. You can scale your environment quickly and securely. However, because of the overhead of virtualization, this reduces the maximum IOPS performance for larger block volumes.
Some legacy or custom environments might require iSCSI because it offers greater control and compatibility. After the volume is attached, you need to log in to the instance and use the iscsiadm command-line tool to configure the iSCSI connection. ISCSI comes to the rescue when your workloads need certain features that paravirtualized attachments don’t offer, demand better performance and when they are not supported on specific instance types like bare metals.
Automate Everything You Can
Manual management does not scale well in the cloud. Use automation tools like the OCI CLI, software development kits, or Terraform for attaching and detaching volumes, backups, and clusters. Schedule regular backups, to safeguard against accidental deletions or unexpected data changes. Keeping your cloud agent plugins up to date will also help your automation run smoothly.
Monitor and Stay Proactive
Set up personalized alerts and regularly review your storage and compute metrics. By keeping an eye on your environment, you can spot and resolve potential bottlenecks or malicious activities before they affect your priority workloads. Over time, you’ll learn your usage patterns and become even more efficient at scaling your resources. Cloud agent plugins are required for the native monitoring to function properly.
Enhancing Resilience with Cloud Tools
Performance is important but protecting your data is just as critical. Luckily, OCI Block Volumes natively provide storage redundancy so you don’t need additional RAID mirroring. Set up automated backups using pre-defined or custom policies to guard against data loss. Use volume groups to manage and protect multiple volumes as a set. Cross-region replication prepares your business to recover quickly from unexpected disruptions.
Distribute your resources across different availability and fault domains. This approach ensures your applications stay up, even if part of your infrastructure is affected by an outage. Customers typically use cross-region backups to protect against regional outages and recover/use their core data in minutes, avoiding any business disruptions.
Stay Flexible, Stay Ready
Elastic block storage is more than just convenient capacity. When you use features like auto-tune, smart striping, automation, and built-in resilience, and when you coordinate your storage and compute, you unlock reliability and performance for all your business needs.
With Oracle Cloud block volumes and these best practices, you’re prepared for your business/technology demands and transformations.
Want to Learn More?
Visit these resources for more information and references:
OCI Block Volume Performance Guide
Shatter the million IOPS barrier