Dell ObjectScale 1.3 Administration Guide

Basic Terminology

The following terms are basic to understand ObjectScale.

Account

A logical construct that corresponds to a customer business unit, tenant, project, and so on, which are relevant to the account admin role and end users that belong to an account.

Admin

Admin of an ObjectScale or a federation of ObjectScale instances.

Buckets

Buckets are object containers that are used to control access to objects.

Chunk

A Chunk is the basic unit in ObjectScale for data storage. A chunk is 128MiB of logical storage that is erasure-coded and written to multiple disks across multiple nodes in the instance.

Custom Resource Definition

Custom Resource Definitions are extensions to Kubernetes API resources. ObjectScale adds CRDs that create custom resources with the specified name and schema.

DECKS

Dell Common Kubernetes Services created by Dell.

Federation

A federation joins multiple ObjectScale instances together. Global information like endpoints or global accounts are replicated throughout an ObjectScale federation.

Horizontal Expansion

Object stores can be expanded through horizontal expansion by adding more Storage Servers to the object store.

IAM Role

An IAM Role (role) is an IAM identity that you can create in your account that has specific permissions. An IAM Role is similar to an IAM user, in that it is an ObjectScale identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot do in ObjectScale. However, instead of being uniquely associated with one person, a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. An IAM role does not have any credentials and cannot make direct requests, and IAM roles need to get short term credentials by assuming role. IAM roles with temporary credentials are used in the certain situations like, federated user access, temporary IAM user permissions , cross-account access, and cross-service access.

IAM User

IAM user has permanent long-term credentials and is used to directly interact with ObjectScale data services. An IAM user is an identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot do in ObjectScale.

KAHM

Kubernetes Application Health Management created by Dell.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.

Large Size Object

A large object is a conceptual distinction, and is an object where the size of the file is such that the time spent moving the payload data of the file is the dominant component of the overall response time. This is in contrast to a small object, where the dominant component of the overall response time would be the transactional overhead. The distinction between these two is useful in understanding the factors of overall system performance.

Namespace

In Kubernetes, namespaces act as a mechanism for isolating groups of resources within a single cluster.

Object Attribute

An object attribute is an aspect of an object version that can be updated and replicated separately, such as an object tag, ACL, or lock.

Object Data

Data of an object version.

Object Data Index

The data locations of an object version on chunks.

ObjectScale Instance

ObjectScale is deployed in a Kubernetes cluster. The deployment is termed as an ObjectScale Instance (OSI). ObjectScale, or the ObjectScale instance, is a software bundle of management services that contains everything that is needed to deploy and consume Dell object storage. The ObjectScale instance is deployed once per Kubernetes cluster and provides management and shared object store services. Including:

• IAM
• Federation service
• Serviceability features such as SupportAssist.

Object Stores

A unique and independent storage system with an individualized life cycle. One or more object stores are deployed by each ObjectScale instance. Object stores are created, updated, and deleted independently from all other object stores managed by the shared ObjectScale instance. Kubernetes cluster resources such as storage, CPU, and RAM are defined for each object store based on workload demand inputs that are specified at object store creation. Resources that are reserved for an object store at creation may be adjusted at any time.

Object Metadata

The system or user metadata of an object. Object metadata is a part of the object version, and it cannot be updated separately. As a result object metadata is not a part of ObjectScale replication attributes. Object metadata is replicated whenever the object data is replicated.

Object Version

All data or metadata or attribute belongs to a specific version of an object.

Resource Names

Resource Names (RNs) are names that uniquely identify resources. Resource Names (RNs) are required when user must specify a resource unambiguously in an ObjectScale.

Small Size Object

A small object is a conceptual distinction, and is an object where the size of the file is such that most of the I/O time is spent accessing metadata and thus, is bounded by the performance of the metadata services.

Storage Class

Storage Class determines which driver is used to create a persistent volume. At a per ObjectScale level, the admin can map storage classes to storage tiers.

Storage Servers (SS)

Storage Servers (SS) in ObjectScale interact with storage media. In ObjectScale, each physical server is a Kubernetes node, and each SS pod instance is an ObjectScale node.

SupportAssist

SupportAssist provides a network based connection to Dell Support. SupportAssist enables Dell Support to receive telemetry and issues, events, and alerts from your ObjectScale instance, and to perform remote troubleshooting, resulting in a fast and efficient time to resolution.

Tenant

A tenant is a logical construct resulting from the binding of an IAM account to an object store. When an IAM account is added to an object store, that account becomes a tenant within that object store.

Vertical Expansion

ObjectScale can be expanded through vertical expansion by increasing the number of volumes per Storage Server replica in the object store.