Block Storage - Concepts

Availability ZoneLink to this anchor

An Availability Zone refers to an isolated location within a specific region. Each Availability Zone provides its own services and infrastructure. For example, fr-par-1, fr-par-2, and fr-par-3 are Availability Zones within the Paris region.

For an extensive list of which regions and AZ a resource is available in, refer to our Product availability guide.

Block volumesLink to this anchor

Block volumes provide network-attached storage you can plug in/out of Instances like a virtual hard drive. From a user's point of view, block volumes behave like regular disks and can be used to increase the storage of an Instance.

Boot-on-blockLink to this anchor

Boot-on-block is a feature that allows booting Instances from attached Block Storage volumes instead of local volumes. It is available for all Instance types.

IOPSLink to this anchor

IOPS or Input/Ouptut Operations Per Second, is a unit of measurement that indicates how many read/write operations a storage device is performing per second.

Scaleway Block Storage Low Latency offers two IOPS limits:

• 5000 IOPS (5K IOPS)
• 15 000 IOPS (15K IOPS)

Local volumeLink to this anchor

The local volume of an Instance is an all-SSD-based storage solution, using a RAID array for redundancy and performance, hosted on the local hypervisor. On Scaleway Instances, the size of the local volume is fixed and depends on the Instance type. Some Instance types do not use local volumes and boot directly on block volumes. In any case, it is always possible to increase the storage of an Instance by adding extra block volumes.

RegionLink to this anchor

A region is a geographical area such as France (Paris: fr-par), the Netherlands (Amsterdam: nl-ams), or Poland (Warsaw: pl-waw) in which Scaleway products and resources are located. Each region contains multiple Availability Zones.

For an extensive list of which regions and AZs a resource is available in, refer to our Product availability guide.

SnapshotLink to this anchor

A snapshot takes a picture of a specific volume at one point in time. For example, you may have a server with one volume containing the OS and another containing the application data and want to use different snapshot strategies on both volumes. Creating snapshots of your volumes gives you total freedom of which volumes you want to back up, while images are more convenient for full backups of your Instance.

Storage Area Networks (SANs)Link to this anchor

A Storage Area Network (SAN) consists of interconnected machines, network infrastructure and storage devices designed for performance and high-availability. Unlike a Network Attached Storage (NAS) which stores all data on a file level, the SAN stores all data on block level, this makes SAN a perfect solution for business critical applications and input/output intense operations like relational databases. The SAN is a network-connected solution, that operates independently from the local hypervisor hosting the virtual Instance. The storage capacity of the block devices on the SAN can be tailored towards your requirements.

VolumesLink to this anchor

A volume is a storage space used by your Instances. Several volumes can be attached to an Instance. In addition, they can be snapshotted, mounted or unmounted.