Hi everyone,

We launched the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud with 256GB block volumes last fall. Since then, we’ve been working closely with customers and partners to build a wide variety of block volume configurations to support multiple applications, but the appetite for larger volumes and more performance has been tremendous.

Today we are enhancing our Block Volume Service with the addition of larger capacity 2TB block volumes. These volumes are built using the same proven technology in our 256GB block volumes. When you are considering your storage layout and performance or capacity requirements, your application traffic profile and throughput are the two primary factors to consider. I’m happy to share the details for for both of these volume types.

Compared to 256GB block volumes, 2TB block volumes are in increase in both dimensions:

  256GB Block Volumes 2TB Block Volumes
Throughput 48MBS 96MBS
IOPS 1,500 @ 4K Blocksize 6,000 @ 4K Blocksize

 

Here’s a review of high level application categories and design considerations for scale when choosing your storage architecture:

Application Categories

General

Read/Write
Data Profile

Block Volume
Scale Consideration per

Bare Metal Compute Instance

Application Scale Consideration
  • Big Data
  • Analytics
  • High Performance Computing

Read Dominant

 260MBS or 30K IOPS instance limit

Filesystem replica for scale

Scale to multi-host with application replication
HDFS, SPARK/HDFS
  • Clusters
  • Databases
  • Shared-Nothing Applications

Variable

63/35 – 35/65

260MBS or 30K IOPS
Cluster or App replica for scale

Oracle Clusterware

Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC)
Clusters and databases configured for “shared nothing” architecture
  • Backup
  • Archive
  • Video Transcode
  • Log ingest

Write Dominant

Use multiple 256GB or 2TB as needed

260MBS or 30K IOPS instance limit
Application replica for scale

Scale to multi-host with application replication

 

By blending your infrastructure and application capabilities, you can efficiently scale from development and test on 256GB block volumes environment to production with 2TB block volumes. Visit our Bare Metal Storage page and the Oracle Learning Library for more detail.

We’re happy to work with you on your cloud application and storage questions. Please send feedback or topics you would like to see covered here.

Lee Gates
Senior Principal Product Manager
Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Team