As per recent announcement, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has added the capability to clone a Block Storage Volume in seconds. This is an important milestone at a time where cloud wars are experienced between various cloud platform vendors.
Cloning of a Block Storage volume is a critical functionality required by many of the enterprise customers. How quickly a clone can be created is an important aspect for a Cloud Infrastructure provider.
Does the time taken to create a clone of a block storage volume vary depending on the capacity of the block storage volume i.e., in GBs to TBs?
What is a Block Storage Volume
Block Storage volume is a highly durable Cloud Storage that can protect and serve your mission critical data. It supports a broad range of I/O intensive workloads.
The block storage volumes are generally attached to Compute VM Instances. They can be detached from one Compute Instance and attached to another Compute Instance. This provides durable and persistent data storage facilities that can be migrated across compute instances and to host large databases.
In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a Block Storage volume can be provisioned with a size of between 50GB and 16TB. If more capacity is required then multiple Block Storage volumes can be created and attached to a Compute Instance.
Clone of Block Storage Volume
Cloning of Block Storage volume enables an organisation to quickly and easily create a copy of an existing block volume without needing to go through the backup and restore process.
The important point to note is that while the cloned volume is being created or accessed, there is no impact on the original block storage volume. OCI users can clone any existing block volume, regardless of whether it is attached to a compute instance or not. They can even create multiple clones of a block volume simultaneously, up to 10 clones at the same time.
The cloning features addresses number of use cases.
Large enterprise deployments can now leverage the block volume clone feature to quickly create multiple development and test copies of production environments to troubleshoot problems or test out configuration changes without impacting production. Cloned block volumes can be attached to the development and test Compute instances.
Cloning and attaching takes only a few seconds compared to a full backup and restore that can take hours to complete.
This is an exciting announcement and there is no doubt that other cloud vendors do come up with similar features with their own cloud platforms.
Further details can be found from the following Oracle Blog Post
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