Cosmos

Cosmos provides translation from CloudServer to the NFS and SMB/CIFS file system protocols. It provides a REST API to CloudServer and translates CloudServer requests into native file system requests. The anticipated use case for Cosmos is to enable CloudServer to detect changes made to a non-object-storage repository with NFS or SMB/CIFS access and to back up these changes to a cloud storage location on a regular schedule. Cosmos serves these changes for CloudServer ingestion over the S3 protocol.

Because these venerable protocols do not maintain object-storage namespaces, Cosmos cannot actively manage resources in the SMB/CIFS or NFS spaces. Instead, changes to the SMB/CIFS or NFS spaces are regularly captured on a schedule set up in cron. At preconfigured intervals, Cosmos detects changes to the NFS or SMB/CIFS side and triggers replication through CloudServer, which sends updates to the configured storage backend.

Cosmos instances must be preconfigured to a server and to a protocol. For example, if the accounting department has a server with both NFS and SMB/CIFS access to the same data, to connect to that server using both protocols (this is not a likely scenario) would require configuring two endpoints. Access to discrete NFS mount points or SMB servers likewise requires configuring multiple Cosmos instances.