Administrator’s Command Line Guide

Chapter 3. Accessing Storage Clusters via S3 Protocol
• An object server stores actual object data received from S3 gateway. The data is packed into special
containers to achieve high performance. The containers are redundant, you can specify the
redundancy mode while configuring object storage. An object server also stores its own data in block
storage with built-in high availability.
• A name server stores object metadata received from S3 gateway. Metadata includes object name, size,
ACL (access control list), location, owner, and such. Name server (NS) also stores its own data in block
storage with built-in high availability.
• An S3 gateway is a data proxy between object storage services and end users. It receives and handles
Amazon S3 protocol requests and S3 user authentication and ACL checks. The S3 gateway uses the
NGINX web server for external connections and has no data of its own (i.e. is stateless).
• The block-level backend is block storage with high availability of services and data. Since all object
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