What is 11 9's Durability?
When we say ElasticLake offers 99.999999999% (eleven 9's) durability, we mean that statistically, you would lose only 1 object out of 100 billion objects stored over a year.
To put that in perspective: if you stored 1 million objects with us, you'd expect to lose one object every 100,000 years.
How We Achieve This
1. Erasure Coding
We don't simply make copies of your data. We use erasure coding, which is more space-efficient and equally resilient.
How it works:
- Your data is split into data fragments
- Additional parity fragments are calculated
- Fragments are distributed across storage nodes
- Any subset of fragments can reconstruct the original
Example: A 12+4 scheme means 12 data fragments plus 4 parity fragments. We can lose any 4 nodes and still recover your data.
2. Geographic Distribution
Fragments are spread across:
- Multiple physical drives
- Multiple servers
- Multiple racks
- Multiple data centers (for replicated buckets)
A single point of failure can't affect your data.
3. Continuous Verification
We don't just store data—we constantly verify it.
Background scrubbing:
- Every fragment is checksummed
- Fragments are periodically re-verified
- Corrupted fragments are automatically repaired
Integrity on read:
- Every read verifies checksums
- Mismatches trigger automatic repair
- You always get correct data
4. Instant Repair
When we detect a problem (drive failure, data corruption, network issue):
- Detection: Continuous monitoring catches issues in seconds
- Isolation: Affected node is isolated immediately
- Repair: Missing fragments are rebuilt from remaining data
- Verification: Rebuilt data is verified before marking complete
This happens automatically, with no impact on your access.
The Numbers
| Component | Failure Rate | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Individual drive | ~2% annually | Redundancy across 16+ drives |
| Server | ~5% annually | Data spread across 100+ servers |
| Rack | ~0.5% annually | Cross-rack distribution |
| Data center | ~0.01% annually | Multi-region replication available |
When you combine independent failure rates with our redundancy levels, the math produces 11 9's durability.
What This Means for You
Your Data is Safe
Sleep well knowing that:
- Hardware failures won't affect you
- Data corruption is detected and fixed
- Even catastrophic events are survivable
You Don't Need Your Own Backups
For durability purposes, you don't need to maintain separate backups of data stored in ElasticLake. (You may still want backups for other reasons like accidental deletion—that's what versioning is for!)
Focus on Your Application
Let us handle the infrastructure complexity. You focus on building great products.
Transparency
We publish our durability metrics:
- Real-time system status at status.elasticlake.com
- Monthly durability reports for enterprise customers
- Incident reports when anything affects availability
Learn More
Want to dive deeper into our architecture? Contact us for a technical deep-dive with our engineering team.
Trust your data to infrastructure built for durability. Get started today.