Advantages

Comparison Between OBS and On-Premises Storage Servers

In this information era, it becomes increasingly difficult for conventional on-premises storage servers to deal with the fast-growing data of enterprises. Table 1 compares OBS with on-premises storage servers.

Table 1 Comparison between OBS and on-premises storage servers

Item

OBS

On-Premises Storage Server

Storage capacity

OBS provides unlimited storage capacity. All services and storage nodes are deployed in distributed clusters. You can expand each node or cluster separately, and you never have to worry about running out of space.

Such servers provide confined storage space due to the limited capacity of the hardware devices they use. When the storage space is not sufficient, you need to buy extra disks for manual expansion.

Security

OBS uses HTTPS and SSL protocols and can encrypt data during uploads. To keep data in transit and at rest safe, OBS uses access key IDs (AKs) and secret access keys (SKs) to authenticate user identities and adopts a range of approaches including IAM policies, bucket policies, access control lists (ACLs), and uniform resource locator (URL) validation.

The owner and users are exposed to security risks from cyber attacks, technical vulnerabilities, and accidental operations.

Costs

OBS is an out-of-the-box service that has no initial capital investment or time or labor costs and frees you from O&M.

The initial deployment of on-premises servers requires high investments and a long construction period, but it quickly lags behind as enterprise businesses change so fast. Additional expenditures are required to ensure security.

OBS Advantages

  • Data durability and service continuity: OBS supports access of massive number of users.

  • Multi-level protection and authorization management: Measures, including versioning, server-side encryption, URL validation, virtual private cloud (VPC)-based network isolation, access log audit, and fine-grained access control are provided to keep data secure and trusted.

  • Highly concurrent access for massive number of objects: With intelligent scheduling and response, optimized access paths, and technologies such as transmission acceleration, event notifications, and big data vertical optimization, you can store massive number of objects in OBS and still experience smooth concurrent access with ultra-high bandwidth and low latency.

  • Easy use and management: OBS provides standard REST APIs and data migration tools to help you quickly move your workloads to cloud. Storage resources are linearly, infinitely scalable, without compromising performance. You do not have to plan storage capacity beforehand or worry about expansion or reduction.