Glossary

Glossary of Block Storage in centron and ccloud³: Terms such as block storage, ext4, formatting, IOPS, LUKS and mounting or attaching disks are explained in an easy-to-understand way.

Attaching a disc

Attaching a centron block storage device to a ccloud³ VM allows you to mount the volume so that it is accessible to the ccloud³ VM’s file system. Similarly, detaching a volume from a ccloud³ VM allows it to be re-attached to another ccloud³ VM.

Block storage

In cloud computing, block storage is a network-based method of data storage. Block storage services, such as centron’s volumes, behave in a similar way to traditional block storage devices, such as hard disks.

ext4

ext4, or the fourth extended file system, is a journaling file system for Linux. The most common use case for ext4 is formatting volumes, hard drives and other storage solutions.

Formatting

Formatting a storage device, such as a hard disk or block storage, creates a file system on the device (and erases all existing data). Normally, you only need to format a device once, when you set it up for the first time.

IOPS

IOPS, or input/output operations per second, is a measure of the performance of storage devices. A higher IOPS figure indicates better performance when reading and writing data.

LUKS

Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is an open-source encryption specification for block storage devices.

Embed

Mounting makes the data on a storage device, such as block storage, available to the file system on a computer. Users on the computer can then read from and write to mounted storage devices.