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Infrastructure · Storage

Storage

Block, file and object storage systems that provide capacity, performance and durability characteristics matched to each workload.

IntermediateUpdated 2026-09-01

Overview

Block storage presents raw volumes over SAN protocols (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NVMe oF) and is used by virtual machines and databases. File storage presents shares over SMB or NFS. Object storage presents an HTTP API and is the default for backups, archives and unstructured data at scale.

Storage design is a performance and durability negotiation: IOPS, throughput and latency requirements on one side, RAID or erasure coding, replication and snapshot policy on the other.

How it works

  1. 01RAID and erasure coding protect against device failure; neither protects against deletion, corruption or ransomware.
  2. 02Snapshots provide near instant recovery points at the storage layer and are frequently the fastest route back from accidental change.
  3. 03Tiering and caching move hot data to faster media automatically; capacity monitoring must account for thin provisioning and deduplication ratios.
  4. 04Replication copies volumes to a second array or region, synchronously or asynchronously depending on distance and RPO.

Security considerations

  • Restrict and monitor storage management interfaces; treat them as Tier 0.
  • Enable immutable snapshots for backup and critical volumes where the platform supports it.
  • Audit share permissions regularly, open 'Everyone' shares remain one of the most common internal exposures.

Common misconfigurations

  • Thin provisioning without alerting, leading to an out of space event that halts every guest on the datastore.
  • Deduplication assumed to be a durability feature.
  • Snapshots treated as the only recovery mechanism.