Choose the Alibaba Cloud storage service that best fits your data availability, durability, and performance requirements.
Availability: the ability of a service to serve data on request. Durability: the annual average expected data loss. Performance: the IOPS or throughput a service delivers.
Alibaba Cloud offers three storage services: Object Storage Service (OSS), Block Storage, and File Storage NAS.
OSS
OSS is a secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable cloud storage service for unstructured data such as audio and video. It delivers the highest durability and availability among Alibaba Cloud storage services. OSS offers three storage classes — Standard, Infrequent Access (IA), and Archive — for hot, warm, and cold data respectively. Colder storage costs less to store but more to access. You can convert storage classes at any time to optimize costs.
Storage class | Description |
Standard storage | Offers highly reliable, available, and performant object storage for frequent data access. This storage class is ideal for use cases such as social media, image and video sharing applications, large websites, and big data analytics. |
Infrequent access storage | Offers highly durable object storage at a lower cost. This storage class has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum storage duration of 30 days. It supports real-time data access but incurs data retrieval fees. It is suitable for use cases with a low access frequency, such as once or twice a month on average. |
Archive storage | Provides a highly durable object storage service with an extremely low storage cost. This storage class has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum storage duration of 60 days. You must restore data before access. Restoration takes about one minute and incurs data restoration fees. If Archive Direct Read is enabled, you can access data without restoration, which incurs direct read retrieval fees. This storage class is suitable for long-term data preservation, such as archives, medical images, scientific materials, and film and television footage. |
Cold archive storage | Provides a highly durable object storage service at a lower cost than archive storage. This storage class has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum storage duration of 180 days. You must restore data before access. Restoration time depends on the data size and the selected restoration mode, and it incurs data retrieval fees. This storage class is suitable for cold data that requires very long-term storage, such as data retained for compliance, historical raw data for big data and AI, long-term media assets in the film industry, and archived videos in online education. |
Deep cold archive storage | Provides a highly durable object storage service at a lower cost than cold archive storage. This storage class has a minimum billable size of 64 KB and a minimum storage duration of 180 days. You must restore data before access. Restoration time depends on the data size and the selected restoration mode, and it incurs data retrieval fees. This storage class is suitable for extremely cold data that requires very long-term storage, such as historical raw data for big data and AI, long-term media archives, regulatory and compliance archives, and tape replacement. |
Block Storage
Block Storage is a high-performance, low-latency block storage service for ECS. Block Storage devices work like physical disks: you can format them and create file systems on them.
Alibaba Cloud offers two types of Block Storage devices for ECS instances: cloud disks based on a distributed storage architecture, and local disks on the physical machines that host ECS instances.
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Cloud disks use a triplicate distributed mechanism for low latency, high performance, durability, and reliability. You can create, resize, and release cloud disks at any time.
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Local disks are physical disks on the machines that host ECS instances. They deliver high storage I/O performance, high random IOPS and throughput, and low latency at low cost — ideal for large-scale storage workloads.
Cloud disks are billed by capacity and can serve as system disks or data disks. Local disks are also billed by capacity but can only serve as data disks. Local disks cannot be purchased separately — they share the billing method of the ECS instance they are created with. For product types and pricing, visit the Block Storage pricing page.
File Storage NAS
File Storage NAS provides file storage for compute nodes such as ECS instances, E-HPC nodes, and Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) nodes. It is a distributed file system that supports NFS and SMB protocols with shared access, elastic scalability, high reliability, and high performance.
File Storage NAS offers four storage types: Extreme NAS, NAS Performance, NAS Capacity, and Infrequent Access.
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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. |
Summary
OSS and File Storage NAS charge only for storage you consume. Block Storage charges for pre-allocated capacity whether or not you use it. To minimize costs, prefer OSS or File Storage NAS and use Block Storage only when your application requires dedicated I/O.