Different storage system types and their integration in LIBSAFE

Unlike conventional preservation where disks are used to store LIBSAFE objects, new cloud storage models allow preservation to be outsourced or moved to new digital storage platforms available on the market. There are currently clients who store their information in external repositories (cloud storage) to delegate the maintenance of the physical infrastructure to a third party and only make use of the available space without putting their data at risk.

From this need to adapt to these different existing platforms, LIBSAFE now supports new types of data warehouses:

  • Support for object storage in FILESYSTEM-type infrastructures

Typical forms of storage in which use is made of physical disks connected to processing equipment for the preservation of objects.

  • Support for object storage in LIBDATA-type infrastructures

Similar to the technical concept of FILESYSTEM type storage, it is a form of storage based on a specific external device and configured for the preservation of objects that has special configurations to interact with LIBSAFE.

One of the main advantages of LIBDATA is the exchange of customized information with LIBSAFE to perform auditing tasks faster than with other storage systems.

  • Support for object storage in S3-type infrastructures

It is based on the concept of storage within private virtual containers in which resources are accessed through structured requests supported by authentication systems on the web.

Within the technology available in the market, a common and widely used platform is the one defined as S3 type or based on S3.

S3 Standard offers high durability, availability, and performance object storage for frequently accessed data. Because it delivers low latency and high throughput, S3 Standard is appropriate for a wide variety of use cases, including cloud applications, dynamic websites, content distribution, mobile and gaming applications, and big data analytics. S3 Storage Classes can be configured at the object level and a single bucket can contain objects stored across S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA. You can also use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Key Features:

  • Low latency and high throughput performance

  • Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones

  • Resilient against events that impact an entire Availability Zone

  • Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year

  • Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement for availability

  • Supports SSL for data in transit and encryption of data at rest

  • S3 Lifecycle management for automatic migration of objects to other S3 Storage Classes

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

With the service demand from the market to use these types of infrastructures, LIBSAFE is adapting and allowing to create disks based on these configurations. Depending on the type of disk chosen by the user in the system, LIBSAFE requests for the access configuration and the internal components are in charge of accessing to the disk with the provided credentials.

From the system configuration section a disk can be registered and in the list of existing disks in the system it can be differentiated by type.

Each of the storage types supported in LIBSAFE has the necessary instructions and details to be clear about the data that needs to be defined in each section.

For all disk creations in LIBSAFE, S3, LIBDATA or FILESYSTEM, different variable requests are made for each, and several entries are common to all:

For FILESYSTEM-based storage

For LIBDATA-based storage

For S3-based storage

In the case of disc type S3 in LIBSAFE it is not allowed to move objects.

NOTE: this technical limitation could be covered in future versions

Moreover, the S3 disks are not supported for the tool Object Explorer (Windows-like interface for use with the disk storage).

Open Object Explorer” button available in preserved objects in disks NOT of S3 type:

Interface WITHOUT access to the Object Explorer button because it is an object preserved on a disk of type S3:

NOTE: Both the option to move disk objects and the display of the Object Explorer present technical limitations of LIBSAFE v6.5, so it is possible that these features will be available in later versions.

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