Scality Connectors
Connectors are software API’s that handle the communication between your application and the Scality RING storage nodes. Scality provides a number of different connectors, mostly based on the HTTP REST protocol. Several connectors are tailored for specific applications, such as the web mail connectors for Zimbra, Open-Xchange, and Dovecot. Scality also supports the open source Droplet library available on Github, which enables you to develop your own customized connectors.
This table describes the main connectors available from Scality, the types of applications for which they are recommended, and the Scality software packages from which they can be installed:
| Connector type | Description | Delivered with |
| SRWS | The Simple REST Web Service connector uses a native object protocol with a flexible data model that provides a high volume of requests involving unstructured data. Typically used for Web 2.0 applications. | RING Core |
| srestd | Scality REST daemon for Zimbra 7 e-mail applications. | Email Pack |
| sproxyd | This REST-based connector provides a simple object protocol with basic GET, PUT, DELETE and HEAD commands. It also provides asynchronous writes, and is typically used as a secondary connector to pipeline client-side operations. | RING Core |
| RS2 | This REST Storage Service connector follows a strict S3 data model with service-bucket-object relations. It includes options for authentication, metering, and billing. Ideal for Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) applications. | StaaS Pack |
| RS2 light | The REST Storage Service Light version connector uses the same S3 data model as the full version, but without the options for authentication, metering, and billing. | RING Core |
| CDMI | The Cloud Data Management Interface connector uses the SNIA CDMI data model, and is a pivotal element of the Scality Open Cloud Access strategy. It provides a local or remote access at the file or object level. Data can be configured for access by key or by path. | RING Core (CDMI by Key) SOFS Pack (CDMI by Path) |
| SOFS | Scale Out File System connectors provide a global namespace for a file system interface with POSIX-compliant behavior. They can be integrated with the OpenStack Cinder project to present block volumes to an OpenStack Compute cluster. | SOFS Pack |
| NFS | Network File System connectors will be available very soon, with support for both the TCP and UDP transport layer protocols. | SOFS Pack |
| CIFS | Common Internet File System connectors will be available very soon. They provide an interface between the Ring and servers running the Samba Windows-Unix interoperability program. This will make the POSIX file system used by Ring storage servers accessible to CIFS client applications running on Windows platforms. | SOFS Pack |
| Scality e-mail API and file system connectors provide seamless integration with enterprise and cloud e-mail services, such as VMware Zimbra, Openwave Messaging, Critical Path, Open-Xchange, Dovecot, and Cyrus | Email Pack | |
| Hadoop | Based on CDMI and SOFS, the Scality solution for Hadoop, announced in a March 2013 press release, will replace HDFS without any modification to the Hadoop stack. | Big Data Pack for Hadoop |
Scale Out File System – (SoFS)
RING’s Scale Out File System (SoFS) option is available as an application and connector pack. This solution represents the state of the art in file access, sharing, and distribution, with a fully parallel design from the client to the core of the RING storage nodes.
The SoFS option facilitates application integration and presents clients with an unlimited file system. With no limits to capacity, file size or the number of files, SoFS can scale to multiple PBs and beyond, while consistently delivering the resilience and performance associated with RING.
SoFS introduces the notion of namespace, which is an intelligent union of volumes with virtual root and file trees. SoFS supports a maximum of 232 volumes per namespace and a maximum of 224 namespaces. A global namespace allows multiple clients to simultaneously access the distributed file system even if they are accessing the same data.
SoFS also offers a variety of advanced features such as auto-scaling, which eliminates the need to configure LUNs or volumes and generates a file system with a simple resizing command. Data is completely isolated across namespaces so that multiple clients or customers can use the same RING infrastructure. Scality RING makes use of it’s internal distributed database (MESA), thereby avoiding common bottleneck and single point of failure issues associated with traditional central metadata services and locations.
SoFS will support NFS v3 very soon and will enable the coexistence of native file access and NFS from different clients.
For more information, please see our SoFS data sheet.
Open platform
To create custom connectors, download the Scality droplet library from Github. Documentation for the droplet library is also available on the Github website.
Custom connectors developed with the droplet library talk to a Scality REST connector daemon and use standard HTTP GET, PUT, and DELETE commands. Other Scality connectors use a separate Ring API that enables direct communication with storage nodes using the RING peer-to-peer protocol..