Everything About Block Volume Elastic Performance
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Block Volume provides high-performance Cloud storage to support a wide range of application workloads. The Block Volume helps to provide network storage that can be used with OCI instances. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service uses NVMe-based storage infrastructure, designed for consistency, and offers flexible and elastic performance.
Block Volume Elastic Performance feature of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service allows organizations to dynamically change the volume performance, while paying for the performance characteristics required independently from the size of the block volumes and boot volumes.
Oracle’s Block Volume Elastic Performance feature provides a better control of elastic performance that can be adjusted for any enterprise’s needs. Its measuring unit is the Volume Performance Unit (VPU). Block Volume performance brings along the concept of volume performance units (VPUs) that can be purchased additionally to allocate more resources to a volume, increasing IOPS/GB and throughput per GB.
Volume Performance Unit (VPU)
- Measured in terms of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput per gigabyte (GB)
- Higher IOPS and throughput results in higher VPU
- VPU is inversely proportional to cost of the storage
- Oracle charges it as performance units per GB per month
For Block Volume Elastic Performance, there are three configuration options that can be dynamically changed, according to the requirement, as shown in the images below. From the OCI console, the feature is available for new and existing Block Volumes.
Oracle’s pricing for Block Volume Performance units per GB/month are given here:
- 0 VPUs at $0 for Lower Cost
- 10 VPUs at $0.017 for Balanced
- 20 VPUs at $0.034 for Higher Performance
- 30 VPUs at $0.051 for Ultra High Performance
Block Volume Elastic Performance has two limitations:
- Configuration can be changed for elastic performance on only three Block Volumes concurrently, per tenancy
- There are only two options for Boot Volumes—Balanced or Higher Performance or Ultra High Performance
Another cost-effective feature is AutoTune, which addresses unattached volume. If, for any reason, you delete the instance and preserve the block volumes attached, then it will set the performance parameter to Low Cost automatically. This results in saved costs since unattached volume doesn’t require high or ultra-high performance.
To Conclude
Overall, Oracle’s Elastic Performance feature is a useful capability for enterprises because it is cost-effective; dynamic; easy to manage; and can be controlled with Console, API, and CLI.
