Cloud is having a profound impact on all aspects of IT. Everything from how infrastructure is acquired and managed to how applications are written is changing from how they’ve been done for over a generation. One of the clear killer apps for cloud is data protection and disaster recovery (DR). The availability of abundant, cheap storage has made it possible for businesses to retain more data off-site than ever before. The elasticity and dynamic provisioning of cloud resources also brings true DR capabilities to small businesses who previously could never have afforded a secondary DR location.
Most cloud providers offer both block storage as well as object storage. For example, Amazon offers Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Block storage is typically used with traditional enterprise workloads that require persistent storage. Block storage is utilized by these applications just as they would consume storage from a storage area network (SAN) device. Files are split into evenly sized blocks of data, but have no metadata associated with them.