Elastic Block Storage - Nuts & Bolts vs 3Rs

Honestly, could the screws to mount a hard drive be any smaller ?

That single question reminds most IT professionals of hours on end going nuts trying to bolt and cable hard drives into servers and RAID arrays. Our reward was the blinking lights; at least until we ran out of disk space.

Enter the good old 3Rs. Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. Instead of a screwdriver, you can provision volumes with your keyboard and Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS). The following example shuffles the 3Rs a bit to make a point.

Step 1 - aRithmetic
Add up the space to backup all of your systems at all of your sites:
This example uses 800GB so you can keep a year of snapshots.

Step 2 - wRiting
Type in this command:
$ ec2-create-volume --size 800

Step 3 - Reading
You will see:
VOLUME vol-4d826724 858993459200 creating 2008-02-14T00:00:00+0000

Then a few moments after that:
VOLUME vol-4d826724 858993459200 available 2008-02-14T00:00:00+0000

And that is the 3Rs method to provision highly available data storage on a virtual server in a completely private account that is up to 10 times more reliable than a typical hard disk.

To delete the volume:
$ ec2-delete-volume vol-4d826724

Of course there's more to it than just the volume, but the steps covered here are the equivalent of buying, shipping, unpacking, inserting, securing, rack mounting, powering, cooling, and securing a bunch of disk drives. The last command is the equivalent of undoing it all.

For WarLock Software and our resellers the process is so easy and risk free that we can always include a free turn-key cloud computing installation with our DR+ product.

Looks like the 3Rs are going to make a comeback. Big time.