Data storage is not the most glamorous topic in the world of cloud platforms, but it’s a core building block that underpins every other solution infrastructure-as-a-service providers offer. As a result, leading players such as Google LLC are actively working to maintain an edge in this area.

The technology giant today announced new features for Persistent Disk, the block storage service in Google Cloud, that will make enterprise applications which rely on it more resistant to outages.

Persistent Disk already has some built-in outages resilience: it creates multiple backup copies of each customer’s information and spreads them out across different data centers in case one of the facilities goes offline. The new features will enable companies to do more with these backup copies.

The first capability, snapshot locality support, lets information technology teams specify where Persistent Disk stores the backup data. If an application processes sensitive records that can’t leave a company’s home jurisdiction for legal reasons, administrators can configure the service to store data copies only in local Google Cloud facilities. Or they might opt to keep the backups in the same Google Cloud facility as the application itself to reduce latency and thus cut the amount of time it takes to recover files after downtime.

“One typical use case is protecting applications that require regularly scheduled maintenance downtime,” Google product manager David Seidman explained. “These apps need short-term protection with very fast rollback in case a maintenance event fails.”

The ability to bounce back from outages rapidly is also a requirement for mission-critical applications essential to a company’s operations. To better support such workloads, Google is adding the ability to perform cross-zone synchronous replication in Persistent Disk. When this option is enabled, the service backs up new data as soon as it’s generated, which means there’s always an up-to-copy that applications can pull up in a few seconds if the original becomes unavailable due to an outage. 

Capping off the updates is a new snapshot scheduling tool. Administrators can now use the Google Cloud management console to configure how often Persistent Disk creates data copies, as well as have the information automatically deleted after a set time period. 

Image: Google