The Linode Block Storage service allows you to create and attach additional storage volumes to your Linode instances. These storage volumes persist independently of Linode instances, but can easily be attached from one Linode to another without the need to reboot. Volumes attached to Linodes appear as block devices and can be formatted and mounted just like any other block device. Think of them as an external drive – in the cloud.
Block Storage Volumes are highly available with 3x synchronous replication. They’re fast – built on great engineering, NVMe/HDD hardware, and a fast network. They’re affordable – $0.10 per GiB/month and no usage fees. They’re cloud – elastic, scalable, expandable, resizable, etc. You can create volumes from 10 GiB to 10,000 GiB (~10TB). You can hot-plug them into and out of running Linodes. Oh, and you can boot off of them, too.
The Block Storage service is available now in us-west/Fremont region only. us-east/Newark will be online in the next few weeks, with us-central/Dallas online shortly after. We’re aiming to have eu-west/London, eu-central/Frankfurt, ap-south/Singapore, and ap-northeast/Tokyo2 online in Q2, 2018.
For more information, take a peek at the Block Storage product page as well as the getting started guide.
Enjoy!
Comments (39)
What about Atlanta?
We don’t have anything to announce for Atlanta just yet, but we’ll be sure to let you know via our blog once we do.
Woohoo, you bumped it to 10TB after all from 1TB!
Congratulations on the launch!
Waiting for Singapore block storage volumes, hopefully can be provisioned in next few weeks, not in Q2 2018 🙂
Whoo hoo yeah sounds really great, can’t wait for Q2 of 2018!
s3-api compatible?
Yes, you can use our APIv3 to interact with your Volumes:
https://www.linode.com/api/volume
Everything I was asking for! I’m about to finish my Cloud Backup product and I’ll use this for sure.
1) Can one block be attached to multiple Linodes simultaneously?
2) If not, how can we use this to share data between running Linodes?
3) What is the speed difference compared to current storage system?
@Ethan:
1) No. Well technically yes, but we don’t/can’t allow it since filesystems (ext4, etc) aren’t cluster aware and would lead to corruption and data loss. This is analogous to a hard drive wired to two computers at the same time.
2) You can save data on Volumes outside of Linodes. Linodes can come and go, the Volumes remain. You can attach and detach Volumes at will via the Linode Manager or the API.
3) It will be slower than the directly-attached Linode storage (which is hardware RAIDed SSDs and is insanely fast). The Block Storage service goes over a [also insanely fast] network, has to sync across multiple nodes, etc – it’s going to be slower. But, plenty fast to be useful for many applications.
Will block storage get backed up with the rest of the instance?
@Scott: No. The Backup service only backs up directly attached disks.
You can create additional Volumes and back up your data on your own between Volumes, or you can clone an existing Volume with one click.
Great to see Block Storage exiting beta and becoming available in more locations. I’d been using it in beta quite successfully as a Nextcloud data store. I’m looking forward to using it with Linodes belonging to clients. Not to mention block storage opens up some new ideas to consider – A MongoDB cluster for dev/testing being one possibility. Look forward to seeing what Linode does next – I appreciate Linode taking the time to roll out new offerings the right way – Fully baked and stable. Wish I could say the same about other providers — Certain companies seem squarely focused on how many offerings they have (quantity) rather than on delivering products that perform acceptably and reliably.
A bit off-topic, but: are there plans to offer object store, preferably swift/s3 compatible?
(P.S. A ‘plus’ sign in the email address does not render one invalid)
Fantastic, I have been waiting on this for a long time. This would be useful for a large, multi terabyte Cassandra cluster – I just hope the I/O is good enough.
“They’re affordable – $0.10 per GiB and no usage fees.”
missing detail: time period covered by the dime payment (month? year? lifetime? nanosecond? it matters ;-))
You’re quite right! That’s an important detail; each Block Storage Volume is $0.10 per GiB per month.
We have a couple block storage volumes that are under 10GB. Given that the minimum is 10GB, will we be charged $1/month for those?
Also, any plans to match Digital Ocean’s new pricing? Their lower end plans aren’t all that different from Linode’s, but once you get to the $80/month plans, the ram and storage differences are significant…
Each volume will be $0.10 per GiB per month no matter the size, so if you happen to have a volume that’s below 10GiB it would be less than $1 per month.
As for our pricing we don’t have anything to announce, but once we do we’ll be sure to let you know via a post on our blog.
Can it be resized when needed, allowing the use of online filesystem grow/shrink operations without missing data, or does every block storage resize imply zeroing the existing data on it?
Hi. You can resize online without data loss, however we haven’t been able to get Linux to recognize that the underlying device has changed size — so unplugging and replugging (or a reboot) is required (then you can resize the filesystem). We’ve tried all the tricks. Perhaps this will be resolved in the future…
Will the block storage be suitable / fast enough to make a /home2 on a cpanel server to host accounts off it ?
It depends on the setup of the site within the cPanel. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it performs well for what you have in mind.
I wish there were a more automated way to boot from Block Storage (mount it to `/`). Also, can we initialize a block storage with, say, a Debian image?
Any ETA on block storage in Newark?
Any ETA on Frankfurt?
If I have a cluster-aware application for a shared block device, would you allow me to mount the same volume on two machines? Thanks.
Linode with quality VPS service. Block Storage is great, I have not tested it yet. But will always accompany you.
Block storage is precisely what was missing. But it’s been at least 1 month without stock in Newark, no ETA either. Any news on that?
Article says:
“us-east/Newark will be online in the next few weeks…”
Can we please get an update? You’ve got multiple comments here requesting ETA and no moderator response. I don’t understand why… your team is clearly facing some hurdles and that’s ok, but many of us have made plans based on the declared availability of this technology and it would be respectful to take 2 or 3 minutes out of your day to give us some information about what’s going on.
Sorry for the delay on providing an update! Right now, we are expecting Newark and Dallas to be online by the end of this month. Frankfurt will be a fast follower. Singapore, Tokyo, and London are all in progress as well – maintaining our tracking for mid to end of Q2 for delivery on all of those. Please let me know if there are any questions.
Thank you Tory Kulick, the update is much appreciated.
Great work, any update on ETA for eu-west/London please?
Any update on Singapore DC?
Block Storage is currently available in Singapore.
https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-use-block-storage-with-your-linode/
Can be used with luks encryption?
Hey there! You shouldn’t have an issue encrypting the Block Storage volume with luks.
Has caker implemented a token bucket yet, can I buy extra tokens b/c everyone else is swapping, and how do I attach it to my 256 MB UML Linode? Wait. What.
Testing this now and loving it. This seems comparable to Amazon EC2. Is that a fair assumption? Is the replication all in the same data center? Thanks.
We’re glad to hear you’re enjoying it! Block Storage volumes are available in the data center they are created in and can be attached to one Linode at a time, however they can be swapped between Linodes.