Administrator’s Command Line Guide

CHAPTER 3
Accessing Storage Clusters via
S3 Protocol
Acronis Storage can export data via an Amazon S3-like API, enabling service providers to:
• run S3-based services in their Acronis Storage infrastructures,
• sell S3-based storage-as-a-service to customers along with Acronis Storage.
The support for S3 expands the functionality of Acronis Storage and requires a working Acronis Storage
cluster.
3.1 About Object Storage
Object storage is a storage architecture that enables managing data as objects (like in a key-value storage) as
opposed to files in file systems or blocks in a block storage. Except for the data, each object has metadata
that describes it as well as a unique identifier that allows finding the object in the storage. Object storage is
optimized for storing billions of objects, in particular for application storage, static web content hosting,
online storage services, big data, and backups. All of these uses are enabled by object storage thanks to a
combination of very high scalability and data availability and consistency.
Compared to other types of storage, the key difference of object storage is that parts of an object cannot be
modified, so if the object changes a new version of it is spawned instead. This approach is extremely
important for maintaining data availability and consistency. First of all, changing an object as a whole
eliminates the issue of conflicts. That is, the object with the latest timestamp is considered to be the current
version and that is it. As a result, objects are always consistent, i.e. their state is relevant and appropriate.
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