You can select an Alibaba Cloud storage service that meets your requirements for data availability, data durability, and performance.
Data availability refers to the ability of a storage service to provide data based on requests. Data durability refers to the annual average expected data loss of a storage service. Performance refers to the input/output operations per second (IOPS) or throughput that can be provided by a storage service.
Alibaba Cloud provides the following storage services to meet different requirements: Object Storage Service (OSS), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and File Storage NAS (NAS). You can select a storage service based on your requirements.
OSS
OSS is a secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable storage service that allows you to store large amounts of data. You can use OSS to store unstructured data such as image, audio, and video data. OSS provides a high level of data durability and availability in Alibaba Cloud. OSS provides the following storage classes to cover various data storage scenarios from hot data to cold data: Standard, Infrequent Access (IA), Archive, Cold Archive, and Deep Cold Archive. Colder data has lower storage costs. However, the cost of accessing colder data is higher. You can easily convert the storage class of your data to reduce your storage costs.
Storage Class | Description |
Standard | Standard provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage for data that is frequently accessed. Standard is suitable for various business applications, such as social networking applications, image, audio, and video resource sharing applications, large websites, and big data analytics. |
IA | IA provides highly durable storage at lower prices compared with Standard. IA has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum billable storage duration of 30 days. IA is suitable for data that is infrequently accessed, such as data accessed once or twice a month. You can access IA objects in real time. You are charged data retrieval fees when you access IA objects. |
Archive | Archive provides high-durability storage at lower prices compared with Standard and IA. Archive has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum billable storage duration of 60 days. You can access an Archive object after it is restored or real-time access of Archive objects is enabled. The amount of time that is required to restore an Archive object is approximately 1 minute. You are charged data retrieval fees if you restore an Archive object. If you access an Archive object after real-time access of Archive objects is enabled, you are charged Archive data retrieval fees based on the size of the Archive object. Archive is suitable for data that needs to be stored for a long period of time and is rarely accessed, such as archival data, medical images, scientific materials, and video footage. |
Cold Archive | Cold Archive provides highly durable storage at lower prices compared with Archive. Cold Archive has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum billable storage duration of 180 days. You must restore a Cold Archive object before you can access it. The amount of time required to restore a Cold Archive object varies based on the object size and restoration priority. You are charged data retrieval fees and API operation calling fees when you restore Cold Archive objects. Cold Archive is suitable for cold data that needs to be stored for an extended period of time, including data that must be retained for an extended period of time to meet compliance requirements, raw data that is accumulated over an extended period of time in the big data and AI fields, retained media resources in the film and television industries, and archived videos in the online education industry. |
Deep Cold Archive | Deep Cold Archive provides highly durable storage at lower prices compared with Cold Archive. Deep Cold Archive has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum billable storage duration of 180 days. You must restore a Deep Cold Archive object before you can access it. The amount of time that is required to restore a Deep Cold Archive object varies based on the object size and restoration priority. You are charged data retrieval fees and API operation calling fees when you restore Deep Cold Archive objects. Deep Cold Archive is suitable for extremely cold data that needs to be stored for an extremely long period of time, including raw data that is accumulated over an extended period of time in the big data and AI fields, retained media resources, regulatory and compliance documents, and data that is archived by using tapes. |
EBS
EBS is a high-performance and low-latency block storage service for Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS). You can use EBS as a physical disk. You can format an EBS device and create a file system on it.
Alibaba Cloud provides a variety of EBS devices for ECS instances, including cloud disks based on a distributed storage architecture and local disks located on the physical machines on which the ECS instances are hosted.
Cloud disks are block-level storage devices provided by Alibaba Cloud for ECS instances. Cloud disks use a triplicate distributed mechanism and provide low latency, high performance, high durability, and high reliability. Cloud disks can be created, resized, and released at any time.
Local disks are physical disks attached to physical machines that host ECS instances. Local disks provide local storage for ECS instances. Local disks are suitable for scenarios in which high storage I/O performance and high cost performance for massive storage are required. Local disks provide low latency, high random IOPS and throughput, and high cost performance.
Cloud disks are billed based on the storage capacity. You can use cloud disks as system disks or data disks. Local disks are billed based on the storage capacity. You can use local disks only as data disks. Local disks cannot be purchased separately. Local disks created together with an ECS instance have the same billing method as the ECS instance. For more information about the disk categories and prices, visit the EBS pricing page.
NAS
NAS is a cloud service that provides a file storage solution for compute nodes. The compute nodes include ECS instances, Elastic High-Performance Computing (E-HPC) instances, and Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters. NAS is a distributed file system that supports the Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols. NAS provides the following features: shared access, elastic scalability, high reliability, and high performance.
NAS provides the following file storage solutions: Extreme NAS, General-purpose Performance NAS, and General-purpose Capacity NAS.
Specification | Description |
Extreme NAS | Extreme NAS is a high-performance file sharing solution that is built based on the latest generation of network architecture and all-flash storage. The maximum capacity is 256 TiB. The bandwidth ranges from 150 MB/s to 1,200 MB/s. The latency is approximately 100 microseconds. Extreme NAS is suitable for latency-sensitive business in which a large number of small files are handled. |
General-purpose Performance NAS | General-purpose Performance NAS uses solid-state drives (SSDs) as storage devices, and provides high throughput, high IOPS, and low latency for workloads. General-purpose Performance NAS is a file sharing solution that is suitable if you require file storage of high throughput, high concurrency, business scalability, and low read latency. General-purpose Performance NAS is suitable if you need to perform frequent read/write operations and have high requirements for response latency. |
General-purpose Capacity NAS | General-purpose Capacity NAS uses SATA hard disk drives (SATA HDDs) as storage devices and provides high-performance storage space at low costs. General-purpose Capacity NAS is a file sharing solution that is suitable for cost-sensitive scenarios in which high throughput, high concurrency, and business scalability are required. General-purpose Capacity NAS is more cost-effective if you do not need to perform frequent read/write operations and do not have high requirements on response latency. |
Summary
OSS and NAS allocate storage resources based on the storage that you use. You are charged only for the storage resources that you use. When you use EBS, you are charged for the pre-allocated storage resources regardless of whether you use the resources. To reduce storage costs, we recommend that you use OSS as your main storage service and use EBS with pre-configured I/O only if it is required for your application.