ROSS, the Research Object Store System currently is implemented with a Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance. The ECS system interchangeably supports both the S3 and Swift protocols for object access, as well as the NFS and HDFS protocols for file-system-like access to objects kept in the store. If you really insist, we also have a way to support SMB through a gateway node (good for Windows-based file shares). Although we haven't benchmarked it, we suspect that SMB access would be slower than other styles of access due to the extra hop through the SMB gateway node. The ECS system also supports the EMC ATMOS and CAS protocols (from the EMC Centera world); however, the UAMS HPC management team is not actively supporting those protocols. Users who chose to utilize those protocols are on their own. Please consult the ECS Data Access Guide for details about the object access APIs supported by our object store. In most cases, the ECS Data Access Guide merely outlines the differences between the APIs as implemented in the ECS system and the reference APIs. Hence, a user may also need to consult the upstream API documentation to get more details about the protocols.
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If using the Swift protocol, the base URL to access the API would be https://swift.ross.hpc.uams.edu/. The Namespace and the Bucket names are included in the path of the Swift API URL, as defined by the Swift API. The Namespace is equivalent to the <account> path component in the API descriptions in the ECS Data Access Guide. The Bucket is equivalent to <container>in the Swift API
The ECS Data Access Guide also outlines alternate ports for reaching the respective APIs. These ports are enabled on the https://ross.hpc.uams.edu. There is no need to prepend the API type (e.g. s3 or swift) to the host name since the port takes care of identifying the API. For example, to access a Bucket named "foo" using the S3 protocol the URL would be https://ross.hpc.uams.edu:9021/foo. When using the alternate ports, only path-based S3 addressing is allowed.
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There are a lot of other options for accessing the object store, including both free and paid software. UAMS IT has a limited number of licenses for S3 Browser, which is a GUI-based Windows tool for access accessing ROSS. We do not endorse any particular tool. Users may pick the tool that they feel most comfortable with.
A Namespace Administrator can also set up a Bucket with File Access enabled at Bucket creation time using the ECS Portal. After creating the file-enabled Bucket, the Namespace Administrator for the Namespace in which the Bucket resides can set up, for example, an NFS share using that Bucket along with user ID mapping. Users can then mount and access the bucket using the NFS protocol, similar to any other network file share. Enabling a bucket for file access does seem to add a tiny bit of overhead to that bucket, and does disable a few advanced features such as S3 object versioning. And accessing a bucket via NFS is slower than accessing using the object protocols (e.g. S3 or Swift). If an Object User needs file access, they might consider using using rclone mounting instead of the NFS mounting, as it might be faster.
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