Types of Virtualisation Storage
Types of Virtualisation Storage#
The different storage types hold, organise and present data in different ways.
File storage (File-level or file-based storage)#
- Organised as a hierachy of files
- Data is stored in a folder
- The path is required
- Oldest and most widely used
- Scaling out by most systems not more capacity
Block Storage (Block-level or block-based storage)#
- Organised into chunks of evenly sized volumes
- Each block has a unique identifier
- Decouples data and puts across multiple environments
- Usually in SAN (Storage Area Network) environments and must be tied to a functioning server
- No single path to data - can be accessed quickly
- Efficient, reliable, easy to manage
- Better for lots of data
- Expensive
- Cannot handle lots of metadata
Object Storage (Object-level or object-based storage)#
- Manages data and links to associated metadata
- flat structure
- files broken into pieces and spread among hardware
- Meta data is important
- requires an HTTP Api
- Scales well
- Objects cannot be modified
- Writing objects is slow