Alibaba Cloud storage services
Choosing the right Alibaba Cloud storage service for your data means finding the best product to match your needs for availability, durability, and performance.
Availability is the ability of a storage product to provide data on request. Durability is the expected average annual data loss. Performance is the input/output operations per second (IOPS) or throughput that a storage product can provide.
Alibaba Cloud provides three types of storage services to meet different storage needs: Object Storage Service, Elastic Block Storage, and File Storage. You can select the storage solution that best suits your requirements.
Object Storage Service
Object Storage Service (OSS) is an Alibaba Cloud service that provides massive, secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable cloud storage. It is ideal for storing unstructured data, such as images, audio, and videos. OSS provides high data durability and availability. It offers multiple storage classes, including Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive Storage, Cold Archive, and Deep Cold Archive, to cover data storage scenarios from hot to cold. The colder the data, the lower the storage cost, but the higher the data access cost. You can easily transition data between these storage classes to optimize storage costs.
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Storage class |
Description |
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Standard |
Provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage services that support frequent data access. Suitable for business scenarios such as images and audio and video files for social networking and content sharing, large websites, and big data analytics. |
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Infrequent Access (IA) |
Provides highly durable object storage services at lower storage costs. Has a minimum billable size (64 KB) and a minimum storage duration (30 days). Supports real-time data access, and a data retrieval fee is charged when you access data. Suitable for business scenarios in which data is accessed infrequently (an average of one to two times per month). |
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Archive |
Provides highly durable object storage services at extremely low storage costs. Has a minimum billable size (64 KB) and a minimum storage duration (60 days). You must restore data (which takes about 1 minute) before you can access it, and a restoration fee is charged. If you enable real-time access of Archive objects, you can access data without restoration, and a real-time retrieval fee is charged. Suitable for scenarios in which data is stored for a long period of time, such as archival data, medical images, scientific materials, and video and film footage. |
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Cold Archive |
Provides highly durable object storage services at lower storage costs than the Archive storage class. Has a minimum billable size (64 KB) and a minimum storage duration (180 days). You must restore data before you can access it. The restoration time depends on the size of the data and the selected restoration mode, and a data retrieval fee is charged during restoration. Suitable for cold data that must be stored for an ultra-long period of time, such as data that must be retained for a long period of time for compliance requirements, raw data accumulated over a long period of time in the big data and AI fields, media resources retained for a long period of time in the film and television industry, and archived videos in the online education industry. |
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Deep Cold Archive |
Provides highly durable object storage services at lower storage costs than the Cold Archive storage class. Has a minimum billable size (64 KB) and a minimum storage duration (180 days). You must restore data before you can access it. The restoration time depends on the size of the data and the selected restoration mode, and a data retrieval fee is charged during restoration. Suitable for extremely cold data that must be stored for an ultra-long period of time, such as raw data accumulated over a long period of time in the big data and AI fields, media data retained for a long period of time, regulatory and compliance archives, and tape replacement. |
Elastic Block Storage
Elastic Block Storage is a block-level storage service that Alibaba Cloud provides for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances. It features high performance and low latency. You can format a block storage device and create a file system on it, just as you would with a physical hard drive.
Alibaba Cloud offers various Elastic Block Storage product types for ECS instances, including cloud disks based on a distributed storage architecture and local disks that use the local hard drives of physical servers.
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Cloud disks are block-level storage products for ECS instances. They use a distributed mechanism with multiple replicas to provide low latency, high performance, durability, and high reliability. You can create, resize, and release cloud disks at any time.
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Local disks are storage devices on the physical servers (hosts) where ECS instances reside. They provide local storage access for ECS instances. Local disks are suitable for scenarios that require high storage I/O performance and are a cost-effective solution for mass storage. They provide low latency, high random IOPS, high throughput, and are highly cost-effective.
Cloud disks are billed based on capacity and can be used as system disks and data disks. Local disks are also billed based on capacity but can only be used as data disks. Local disks are attached to specific ECS instance types and cannot be purchased separately. Their cost is included in the price of the instance type. For more information about product types and pricing, see the Elastic Block Storage pricing page.
File Storage
Alibaba Cloud File Storage NAS is a file storage service for compute nodes, such as Alibaba Cloud ECS instances, E-HPC, and container services. It is a distributed file system that provides shared access, elastic scalability, high reliability, and high performance. It supports the NFS and SMB protocols.
NAS is available in three types: Extreme, General-purpose Performance, and General-purpose Capacity.
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Specifications |
Description |
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Extreme |
A high-performance shared file storage built on Alibaba Cloud's latest network architecture and all-flash storage. It provides a maximum capacity of 256 TiB and a starting bandwidth of 150 MB/s, which can be expanded to 1200 MB/s. It delivers stable latency in the hundreds of microseconds. This type is ideal for workloads that involve massive numbers of small files and are sensitive to latency. |
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General-purpose |
Uses solid-state drives (SSDs) as the storage medium to deliver high throughput, high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and low latency for application workloads. It is suitable for file sharing services that require high concurrency, high throughput, elastic scaling, and low read latency. This type offers performance advantages for workloads with frequent read/write operations and high system response requirements. |
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Premium |
Uses SSDs as the storage medium to provide high throughput, IOPS, and low latency for application workloads. It is suitable for file sharing services that require high concurrency, high throughput, elastic scaling, and low read latency. This type offers performance advantages for workloads with frequent read/write operations and high system response requirements, but at a lower storage cost than the Performance type. |
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General-purpose capacity |
Uses SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) as the storage medium to provide high-performance storage at a lower cost. It is suitable for cost-sensitive file sharing services that require high concurrency, high throughput, and elastic scaling. This type offers a cost advantage for workloads with infrequent read/write access and less demanding latency requirements. |
The storage unit prices for different NAS product types are as follows:
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NAS Specifications |
Unit price for storage (CNY/GB/month) |
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Extreme |
1.8 |
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Performance |
1.85 |
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Capacity |
0.35 |
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Infrequent Access |
0.15 |
Summary
Object Storage Service (OSS) and File Storage NAS allocate storage resources based on usage, and you pay only for what you use. However, for Elastic Block Storage, you are charged for pre-allocated storage resources regardless of usage. Therefore, to meet functional requirements while keeping storage costs low, you should maximize the use of OSS. Use the more expensive Elastic Block Storage with pre-configured I/O only when your application requires it.