Administrator’s Command Line Guide

3.1. About Object Storage
storage services run on hosts, no virtual environments (and hence licenses) are required for object
storage.
For more information, see Object Storage Components on page 18.
3.1.2 Object Storage Overview
In terms of S3 object storage, a file is an object. Object servers store each object loaded via the S3 API as a
pair of entities:
• Object names and associated object metadata stored on an NS. An object name in the storage is
determined based on request parameters and bucket properties in the following way:
•
If bucket versioning is disabled, an object name in the storage contains bucket name and object
name taken from an S3 request.
•
If bucket versioning is enabled, an object name also contains a list of object versions.
• Object data stored on an OS. The directory part of an object name determines an NS to store it while
the full object name determines an OS to store the object data.
3.1.2.1 Multipart Uploads
A name of a multipart upload is defined by a pattern similar to that of an object name but the object that
corresponds to it contains a table instead of file contents. The table contains index numbers of parts and
their offsets within the file. This allows to upload parts of a multi-part upload in parallel (recommended for
large files). The maximum number of parts is 10,000.
3.1.2.2 Object Storage Interaction with a Storage Cluster
An S3 storage cluster requires a working Acronis Storage cluster on each of S3 cluster nodes. Acronis Storage
provides content sharing, strong consistency, data availability, reasonable performance for random I/O
operations, and high availability for storage services. In storage terms, S3 data is a set of files (see Object
Server on page 19) that the Acronis Storage filesystem layer (vstorage-mount) does not interpret in any way.
17