Distributed Block Storage for High Availability: What You Need to Know

Author: Carol Platz

A striking statistic highlighting the impact of data availability comes from a recent report by DataNumen (May 2025). Their findings indicate that 85% of organizations experienced one or more data loss incidents in 2024. Even more alarming, the report notes that 93% of businesses that suffer prolonged data loss lasting more than 10 days go bankrupt within a year. Underscoring the catastrophic, existential risk that storage systems delivering inadequate availability can negatively impact a business’s viability.

As we near the exabyte scale, coupled with the need for always-on applications, legacy storage architectures are increasingly proving inadequate for delivering high availability. This is where scalable, distributed block storage systems emerge, offering a compelling alternative that underpins modern cloud infrastructure, AI/ML workloads, and mission-critical applications.

The Imperative of High Availability in Modern Data Infrastructure

High availability (HA) refers to an IT system’s ability to operate continuously without failure for a specified period. In the context of data storage, HA is critical. As you read in the introduction, downtime and data availability issues can result in significant financial losses, disruption to a business’s essential operations, or, in the case of e-commerce and financial services, reputational damage and even closure. For applications ranging from transactional databases to real-time analytics, in virtualized or containerized environments, uninterrupted access to data is the lifeblood of productivity.

Architecting storage systems for high availability has taken many forms over the years. Traditional systems, such as Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN), often rely on redundant hardware components, including RAID arrays and dual controllers, to mitigate single points of failure. While this approach is effective to a degree by offering component-level resilience or protection against failures within an array, the architecture is inherently limited in its scalability. Thus, the architecture is not suited for modern workloads at scale. In contrast, a distributed block storage architecture distributes data across multiple nodes that can span racks, data centers, or even regions, thereby distributing the risk and processing power to ensure resilience against a broader range of failures while offering high scalability and availability. An architecture better suited for modern workloads at scale.

If an organization is to thrive, understanding the IT system architecture that offers the most significant data protection and availability is paramount. Don’t wait for a catastrophe to realize your legacy storage systems don’t provide the HA you need to survive a disaster. Don’t be a statistic.

Distributed block storage is the architecture of choice for modern data centers, offering more than high availability (HA), but also the ability to scale on demand. By understanding the core principles of distributed block storage, IT professionals can make informed decisions on how to achieve HA by using modern block storage solutions, such as software from Lightbits.

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