Location Management

Users save data to files, which are stored as objects in buckets. Buckets are stored in locations, which correspond (quite roughly) to a service and a region, such as AWS us-east-1, or GCP europe-west1. Before you can establish a location in Orbit, you must have an account with at least one cloud storage service. This can either be a public cloud, such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Platform, or Scality’s private cloud, the RING with S3 Connector. RING provides resilient, reliable object storage, and S3 Connector provides Amazon S3-compatible command set and namespace.

Public Clouds

If you don’t have a cloud storage account already configured, here are some useful links to get started. These are subject to change without notice.

See Zenko Installation for advice on sizing, cluster configuration, and other preparations.

Scality RING with S3 Connector

S3 Connector provides an Amazon S3-compliant frontend for the Scality RING private cloud storage solution.

Except as noted, you can integrate to S3 Connector exactly as you would integrate to any of the other S3-based cloud services, such as AWS, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi Hot Cloud, or Ceph RADOS Gateway. See the S3 Connector and RING documentation at https://documentation.scality.com/ for more details on deploying and configuring S3 Connector with the RING.

Scality RING with sproxyd

sproxyd presents a RING-native REST API providing direct object-store access to the RING. If you are integrating to a RING that does not have an S3 Connector installed, this is probably the API you use to access the RING.

Zenko Local

The Zenko Local filesystem is a convenient, easily configured test location that enables product familiarization and simple operations. It is internal to Zenko, and serves as the default location for otherwise unnamed locations that rely on the default “us-east-1” location. Because it is internal to Zenko, the “Add New Storage Location” prompt does not offer configurations for credentials or bucket naming at setup time. These are handled elsewhere in the Orbit user interface.

Warning

While convenient for testing purposes, the Zenko Local filesystem is not recommended for use in a production setting. The Zenko Local filesystem introduces a single point of failure and is thus unsuitable for a highly-reliable, highly-available storage solution.

NFS Mount

Zenko can access information and file system metadata over the NFSv3 and NFSv4 protocols. To configure Zenko to access NFS using out-of-band updates, review the NFS host’s /etc/exports file to find the relevant export path, hostname, and NFS options. Use nfsstat on the NFS host to discover the relevant NFS version and protocol.

Important

Do not configure CRR for NFS mounts unless there is predictable down time for replication. For NFS CRR, Zenko scans the NFS file system, then detects and replicates changes. It assumes that the NFS mount does not change after scanning but before replication is complete. Changes written after the initial scan but before replication completes may not be replicated.

AWS Source

Zenko can access information and file system metadata from AWS S3 services using out-of-band updates in a flow similar to that used to extrapolate metadata from NFS. To configure Zenko to access AWS using out-of-band updates, follow the instructions at Set Up Out-of-Band Updates for AWS.

You can: