First, it is important to understand the differences between throughput and random I/O. Throughput is very important for the general use cases of writing sequential data to your drives, such as having extra space for logging, streaming data or basic file access. It is important to note that throughput will be roughly the same for both our Standard volumes (SATA) and Solid State Drive (SSD) offerings. If you are just looking for a way to store extra data, you will be best served with the Standard Cloud Block Storage volume.

Random I/O is very important for application, database and NoSQL servers – essentially, it is important for any server that needs to be able to quickly write to random parts on the disk. In this case, our SSD offering is many times faster than our Standard offering, and will be the best solution when you are looking to improve performance of random I/O.

Another best practice considers when to place your Cloud Block Storage drives in a RAID configuration. If you are in a High Availability (HA) environment and you want to make sure that your data is available, you would generally follow the same best practices for setting up a RAID array as you would with a dedicated environment. You can set up your Cloud Block Storage volumes in a RAID array, usually a mirrored configuration, to help provide extra redundancy and durability. This means that if a drive goes away or fails, you can easily replicate your data and replace another drive in the RAID array.

However, we do not recommend using RAID to enhance the performance of your Cloud Block Storage volumes. Setting up the Stanard drives in a RAID array will not give you as good of an experience as using the SSD Cloud Block Storage volumes. So remember: when you need extra performance, be sure to use SSDs.

Finally, whether you are using RAID or not, it is always a good idea to back up your data, and there are two different ways you can do this. Using the control panel or API, you can back up your Cloud Block Storage volumes to Cloud Files. This will give you a durable backup and you can use that to create new volumes down the road. The other option is to use Cloud Backup to make a file level backup of your block device. This will give you the capability to restore a specific file (such as a document) at any point in time; you won’t have to restore your entire drive just to restore that one file.

These are some of the best practices I’ve seen while using Cloud Block Storage. If you come across any others, be sure to comment on this post and let us know!

Previously, Chuck discussed some of the differences between Cloud Files and Cloud Block Storage. Be sure to check out this page to find out how to get started with Cloud Block Storage on the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack.

Cloud Files is what is called object storage, and it is great for storing media, web assets and backups. Data stored in Cloud Files is both durable and reliable because we store three copies of all those pieces of data. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to expose that data through the Content Delivery Network (CDN), which gives your websites much faster load times because those servers are geographically dispersed all over the world. But, Cloud Files is not a hard drive.

Cloud Block Storage was designed for people whose needs require increasing their hard drive. With Cloud Block Storage, users have file level access; it allows you to do things like processing, or gives applications access for things like encoding video. Just like a hard drive that you have at home, you will want to backup the data on a Cloud Block Storage drive. You can do this by backing up your Cloud Block Storage data to our Cloud Files offering to have a durable and reliable version of that data for you.

Previously, Chuck talked about some of the options for Cloud Block Storage including Standard volumes (SATA) and SSD drives. In his next post, he will give you three best practices for Cloud Block Storage. Be sure to check out this page to find out how to get started with Cloud Block Storage on the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack.

Our Standard volumes (SATA) storage is very similar to other offerings of our competitors. The Standard drives are the go-to option to for users who simply need to increase their hard drive size with extra storage to store things like logs, backups or images for your website. Standard volumes are the best option when you simply need a solid solution to store data.

For our users who might have a database server or an application that needs a very high performance with random reads and writes, we offer a Solid State Drive (SSD) offering to achieve that level of performance. Before, with our competitors, you would have to buy several Standard volumes and RAID them together to improve the performance. However, with our SSD offering in Cloud Block Storage you only have to purchase one drive to gain that performance.

Now, some of you might need a hybrid approach for your cloud configuration. With Cloud Block Storage, you can attach both SSD and Standard volumes to the same servers. So for the applications that might need faster indexing, you could put those indexes on the SSD volumes while you put your more persistent data (that data that just rests) on your Standard volumes. This hybrid approach gives you the ability to tailor fit the Cloud Block Storage solution to your needs.

Previously, Chuck gave an overview into what Cloud Block Storage is and how it could be beneficial to your cloud configuration. In his next post, he will talk about some of the differences between Cloud Files and Cloud Block Storage. Be sure to check out this page to find out how to get started with Cloud Block Storage on the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack.

If you are like me, you take pictures of your kids or videos of your dog and save them to your computer at home. Eventually, you fill up your hard drive so you have to either go to a store or online to buy a new hard drive to replace your old one. Now you have extra space to fill with more pictures and videos.

In the Rackspace Cloud, you have a cloud server with a hard drive that eventually would run out of space. Prior to Cloud Block Storage, there was no way to buy an extra hard drive, instead you would have to buy a whole cloud server. While this new instance would include a bigger hard drive, it would also include extra memory and CPU power that you might not need, but would have to pay for to get that extra hard drive space.

Cloud Block Storage solves this problem because you can buy virtual hard drives in the cloud that can be used by any next generation Rackspace Cloud Server powered by OpenStack. The Cloud Block Storage drives are like any other hard drive; they show up as a new device and you can format them with any file system that you want to use. Furthermore, you can backup the Cloud Block Storage drives to our Cloud Files product to give you the security of knowing that you have a backup and that you can create new volumes based on that backup.

In the next post, Chuck will talk about some of the options for Cloud Block Storage including Standard volumes (SATA) and SSD drives. Check out this page to find out how to get started with Cloud Block Storage on the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack.