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CloudSoda breaks out storage targets, local agents, and accessors. This modular approach provides enough flexibility for a wide range of scenarios, especially when the same storage is accessed through various protocols.
Storage targets are the storage silos themselves. Broadly, there are two types of storage that CloudSoda supports: file and object. File storage can be shared storage or local direct attached drives. Object storage can be private, such as Dell ECS, or public cloud.
Agents are the next layer in SoDA. Agents can be thought of as the computers that have access to storage targets and will be doing data movement. CloudSoda supports Windows, Linux, and macOS agents. When an agent has been configured in the CloudSoda console, a configuration file for that agent is automatically generated and available for download from the SoDA Controller.
Finally, CloudSoda uses the concept of storage accessor. An accessor defines how a particular agent connects to a storage target. For example, a Linux client connecting to an NFS share will have a particular path to that storage. A Windows client will use SMB and have a UNC path with a drive letter to the same storage. This allows multiple agents to access the same storage device which is represented as a single storage in SoDA. Both of those clients can also be connected to the same S3 storage using the same bucket credentials or separate credentials for security needs. In this example, there would be three accessors, an NFS accessor, an SMB accessor, and an S3 accessor. The Linux agent would use the NFS and S3 accessors while the Windows agent would get the SMB and S3 agent. This level of configuration greatly reduces the need for complex path mapping or translation.
The agent configuration in Figure 5 is such an example. The Linux agent is connected to two storage targets: an NFS share on PowerScale and an S3 Bucket on ECS.