Get Started with Block Volumes

Block volumes provide high-performance, persistent cloud storage for a wide range of application workloads.

icon representing block storage cloning icon representing realtime elastic performance and cost configuration icon representing volume groups
Block Storage Cloning Realtime Elastic Performance and Cost Configuration Volume Groups

Create point-in-time, direct disk-to-disk copies of an existing volume within seconds, for scenarios such as storage scale out, disaster recovery, DevTest environments, duplication, and production troubleshooting.

Dynamically change the performance and cost characteristics of block storage and boot volumes instantaneously.

Group multiple block and boot volumes, and perform crash-consistent point-in-time coordinated backups and clones across all the volumes in the group.

Features

Built-in security and protection

Encrypted and isolated

  • By default, all block volumes and their backups are encrypted at rest and isolated by tenancy for maximum security.

Industry-standard connectivity

  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service is based on industry-standard iSCSI protocol. Simplified paravirtualized options enable volume attachment without iSCSI configuration commands.
  • Volumes can be attached for read/write access by default, or read-only as needed.
Robust data protection

Highly reliable

  • All volumes have built-in durability and run on redundant hardware.

Integrated backup to Object Storage

  • Automated and policy-based scheduled backups, as well as a choice of incremental versus full on-demand backups, are built-in and provided at no additional cost.
  • Backup your block and boot volumes to highly durable Oracle Object Storage automatically based on an automated policy or on-demand with just a few clicks, without impact on running applications.
  • Cross-region backup copy for business continuity, migration, expansion of applications, and data on remote regions.

Volume restores

  • Attach restored block and boot volume backups to new or existing compute instances. Scale out many copies of your data for demanding applications by restoring a backup to multiple block volumes.
Boot volumes
  • Manageable and versatile boot volumes for compute instances with all the advantages of block volumes, including backup, clone, volume groups, elastic performance and cost capabilities.
  • Custom size large boot volumes up to 32 TB in 1 GB increments.
Easily scale up or down
  • Scale block and boot volumes from 50 GB up to 32 TB. Dynamically attach and detach up to 32 block volumes to scale up to 1 PB of remote block storage per compute instance.
  • Extend existing block and boot volumes while they are online, growing their size up to 32 TB. You can also clone existing volumes or restore from backups to move to larger volumes.
  • Dynamically reconfigure and scale existing or new block volumes for performance or cost.

Links to get started:

Overview of Block Volume

Creating a Block Volume

Attaching a Block Volume to an Instance

Tutorial: Create an Always Free instance and attach a block volume