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A file system must be applied on top of the block-level storage to map 'files' onto a sequence of blocks. Amazon EBS (elastic block store) is an example of a cloud block store. [2] Cloud block-level storage will usually offer facilities such as replication for reliability, or backup services. [3]
Some newer file systems, such as Btrfs and FreeBSD UFS2, attempt to solve this through techniques called block suballocation and tail merging. Other file systems such as ZFS support variable block sizes. [4] [5] Block storage is normally abstracted by a file system or database management system (DBMS) for use by
Object storage (also known as object-based storage [1] or blob storage) is a computer data storage approach that manages data as "blobs" or "objects", as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, and block storage, which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. [2]
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage.SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage.
This is in contrast to block-based storage virtualization, which uses blocks as the basic unit. It is a way to abstract away the physical details of storage and allow files to be stored on any type of storage device, without the need for specific drivers or other low-level configuration. File-based virtualization can be used for storage ...
Distributed block storage is a computer data storage architecture that the data is stored in volumes (known as blocks, a term dating back to Project Stretch [1]) across multiple physical servers, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and object storage which manages data as objects.
A related technique is single-instance (data) storage, which replaces multiple copies of content at the whole-file level with a single shared copy. While possible to combine this with other forms of data compression and deduplication, it is distinct from newer approaches to data deduplication (which can operate at the segment or sub-block level).
In some situations, continuous data protection requires less space on backup media (usually disk) than traditional backup. Most continuous data protection solutions save byte or block-level differences rather than file-level differences. This means that if one byte of a 100 GB file is modified, only the changed byte or block is backed up.