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The IT world has had purpose-built applications, servers and networking for as long as digital tech has been in use. Purpose-built storage, however, hasn’t seen the same type of adoption rate largely because most forms of data can be stored safely in any type of storage: solid-state, hard disk, cloud or on-premises.
New York City-based DigitalOcean, a simple and fast hosting service built expressly for developers, has put up its flag here by adding a new complementary cloud storage service. On July 13, the company released Block Storage, something that had been highly requested from its customers.
Block Storage is a highly available and scalable SSD-based cloud service that enables developers to attach extra disk space to DigitalOcean cloud servers, which the company calls Droplets.
DigitalOcean’s Block Storage costs 10 cents per GB per month and is based on provisioned capacity only. Thus, there is no need for complicated formulas to determine the overall cost for a transactions limit.
“We set out on a mission to build a simple and robust cloud computing platform so that engineering teams can spend less time configuring and automating their infrastructure and more time focused on software development,” co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky said. “By adding a highly performant Block Storage offering to our platform, developers can easily deploy and manage their SaaS applications and businesses as they scale. This is one step closer to building the next-generation platform.”
Block Storage is a complementary product to DigitalOcean’s Droplets, which provide compute power and local storage, by making them more expandable and flexible. By attaching Block Storage to DigitalOcean Droplets via the control panel or API, Uretsky said, developers can see the following benefits:
—High availability: Block Storage stores data on hardware that is separated from the Droplet, replicating it multiple times across different racks and reducing the chances of data loss in the event of hardware failure.
—Scalable and flexible: Developers can scale and resize SSD-based Block Storage volumes from 1GB to 16TB and move them between Droplets. The ability to attach extra Block Storage to Droplets dramatically increases their flexibility, enabling developers to scale applications, databases, binary assets, shared and distributed file systems, and more.
—Reliable and secure: All the data is encrypted at rest and transmitted to the Droplets over isolated networks.
Five-year-old DigitalOcean claims users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds. Pricing plans start at $5 per month for 512MB of RAM, 20GB SSD, 1 CPU and 1TB transfer. DigitalOcean claims a 99.99 percent uptime service-level agreement (SLA) and has servers located in New York, San Francisco and Amsterdam.