The Center for High Performance Computing includes an object store as a lower-cost alternative for archiving data. Each HPC user can request private space on the object store for personal use, for example to back up their home directory on Grace's cluster storage, or to hold research data sets when they are not being actively used. In addition, labs, departments, or other entities can request shared space that can be utilized by all of their users.
The object store currently is implement 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 (good for Window-based file shares) through a gateway node. 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 (from the EMC Centera world) protocols; however, the UAMS HPC management team is not actively supporting those protocols. A user who choses to utilize those protocols is on their own. The guide for accessing data on an ECS can be found at http://doc.isilon.com/ECS/3.2/DataAccessGuide/index.html#ecs_c_docs_landing_page_content.html. Please consult that document for details about the object access APIs supported by our object store. In most cases, the Dell EMC 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 even more details about the protocols.
Some grasp of ECS terminology and concepts is useful for understanding how to interact with the ECS system. The ECS system divides the storage into Namepspaces. An Object User is assigned to a particular Namespace, which is the default Namespace used when no specific Namespace is identified in a RESTful API call. Each Namespace holds a set of Buckets, which in turn each hold a set of Objects. An Object User may create as many buckets with whatever characteristics as they like within the Namespace to which the Object User belongs. Each Bucket in a namespace belongs to a Bucket Owner in that Namespace, which by default is the Object User who created that Bucket. The Bucket Owner can set an Access Control List (ACL) on their Buckets that dictate which other Object Users may search or modify that Bucket, including who can create, read, update, or delete Objects held within that Bucket. The Bucket Owner can also set ACLs for each individual object, as desired.