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, with data centers deployed across the world. 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 encrypts 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 permissions, 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.
Reliability	The OBS five-level reliability architecture ensures up to 99.9999999999% of durability and up to 99.995% of continuity, much higher than those of the conventional architecture.	Due to limited investment, on-premises storage servers cannot ensure reliability at all levels of media, servers, cabinets, data centers, and regions. Once there is a failure or disaster, it may cause irreversible data loss to enterprises.
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. You only need to pay as you go. OBS offers tiered-pricing, meaning the more you use, the more you will save.	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 provides storage for cloud albums of mobile phones to support access of hundreds of millions of users. It delivers a data durability of up to 99.9999999999% and service continuity of up to 99.995% by using cross-region replication, cross-AZ disaster recovery, device and data redundancy in an AZ, slow disk or bad sector detection, and other technologies.
Figure 1 Five-level reliability architecture of OBS
Multi-level protection and authorization management: OBS has passed the Trusted Cloud Service (TRUCS) certification. 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 hundreds of billions of objects: With intelligent scheduling and response, optimized access paths, and technologies such as transmission acceleration and big data vertical optimization, you can store hundreds of billions of objects in OBS and still experience smooth concurrent access with ultra-high bandwidth and low latency.
Figure 2 Access to numerous objects at high-level concurrency
Easy use and management: OBS provides standard REST APIs, SDKs in different programming languages, 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. When needed, you can ask Huawei Cloud to perform online upgrade or capacity expansion on your behalf.
Tiered storage and on-demand use: Both pay-per-use and yearly/monthly billing are available for OBS. Data in each of the Archive, Infrequent Access, and Standard storage classes is separately metered and billed, which reduces storage costs.