Veritas Access Getting Started Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): Access (7.4.2)
Platform: Linux

About Veritas Access

Veritas Access is a software-defined scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solution for unstructured data that works on commodity hardware. Veritas Access provides resiliency, multi-protocol access, and data movement to and from the public or private cloud based on policies.

Figure: Veritas Access architecture

Veritas Access architecture

You can use Veritas Access in any of the following ways.

Table: Interfaces for using Veritas Access

Interface

Description

GUI

Centralized dashboard and Quick Actions with operations for managing your storage.

See the GUI and the Online Help for more information.

RESTful APIs

Enables automation using scripts, which run storage administration commands against the Veritas Access cluster.

See the Veritas Access RESTful API Guide for more information.

Veritas Access Command-Line Interface (CLI)

Single point of administration for the entire cluster.

See the manual pages for more information.

Table: Veritas Access key features describes the features of Veritas Access.

Table: Veritas Access key features

Feature

Description

Supported protocols

Veritas Access includes support for the following protocols:

  • Amazon-compatible S3

  • CIFS

  • FTP

  • iSCSI target

  • NFS

  • Multi-protocol support for NFS with S3

WORM storage for Enterprise Vault Archiving over CIFS

Veritas Access can be configured as WORM primary storage for archival by Enterprise Vault.

Veritas Access is certified as a CIFS primary WORM storage for Enterprise Vault 12.1.

For more information, see the Veritas Access Solutions Guide for Enterprise Vault.

WORM support over NFS

Veritas Access supports WORM over NFS.

Creation of Partition Secure Notification (PSN) file for Enterprise Vault Archiving

A Partition Secure Notification (PSN) file is created at a source partition after the successful backup of the partition at the remote site.

For more information, see the Veritas Access Solutions Guide for Enterprise Vault.

Managing application I/O workloads using maximum IOPS settings

The MAXIOPS limit determines the maximum number of I/Os processed per second collectively by the storage underlying the file system.

Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS)

Enables cluster-wide network sharing of local storage.

Scale-out file system

The following functionality is provided for a scale-out file system:

  • Manage a single namespace spanning over both on-premises storage as well as cloud storage, which provides better fault tolerance for large data sets.

  • Highly available NFS and S3 shares.

    You use scale-out file systems if you want to store a large capacity of data in a single namespace (3 PB is the maximum file system size).

  • Creation of CIFS shares.

  • File sharing for a scale-out file system using FTP.

  • Read-ahead mechanism to pre-fetch the data and boost the read performance.

Cloud as a tier for a scale-out file system

Veritas Access supports adding a cloud service as a storage tier for a scale-out file system. You can move data between the tiers based on file name patterns and when the files were last accessed or modified. Use scheduled policies to move data between the tiers on a regular basis.

Veritas Access moves the data from the on-premises tier to Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Web Services (AWS), GovCloud (US), Azure, Google cloud, Alibaba, Veritas Access S3, and IBM Cloud Object Storage based on automated policies. You can also retrieve data archived in Amazon Glacier.

SmartIO

Veritas Access supports read caching on solid state drives (SSDs) for applications running on Veritas Access file systems.

SmartTier

Veritas Access's built-in SmartTier feature can reduce the cost of storage by moving data to lower-cost storage. Veritas Access storage tiering also facilitates the moving of data between different drive architectures and on-premises.

Snapshot

Veritas Access supports snapshots for recovering from data corruption. If files, or an entire file system, are deleted or become corrupted, you can replace them from the latest uncorrupted snapshot.

Deduplication

Veritas Access can participate in deduplicating data in several ways, depending on the storage environment:

  • Using Veritas Data Deduplication

    Veritas Access participates in a NetBackup Media Server Deduplication Pool-based backup policy by storing and indexing deduplicated blocks for a NetBackup server.

    See the Veritas Access Solutions Guide for NetBackup for more information.

  • Veritas Access can examine files in a local file system and deduplicate them on a scheduled basis.

    for more details on configuring this functionality

In cases where Veritas Access is used to store deduplicated backup data from another source, there is no need to set up a separate deduplication mechanism.

Note:

It is recommended to use Veritas Deduplication for long-term data retention instead of the OpenDedup solution.

Compression

You can compress files to reduce the space used, while retaining the accessibility of the files and having the compression be transparent to applications. Compressed files look and behave almost exactly like uncompressed files: the compressed files have the same name, and can be read and written as with uncompressed files.

Erasure coding

Erasure coding is configured with the EC log option for the NFS use case.

Veritas Access as an iSCSI target for RHEL 7.x

Veritas Access as an iSCSI target can be configured to serve block storage. An iSCSI target as service is hosted in an active-active mode in the Veritas Access cluster.

Configuring Veritas Access in IPv4 and IPv6 mixed mode

Support for configuring the Veritas Access cluster in an IPv4 environment, or an IPV6 environment, or in a mixed mode environment where you have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

NetBackup integration

Built-in NetBackup client for backing up your file systems to a NetBackup master or media server. Once data is backed up, a storage administrator can delete unwanted data from Veritas Access to free up expensive primary storage for more data.

See the Veritas Access Solutions Guide for NetBackup for more information.

OpenStack plug-in

Integration with OpenStack:

  • OpenStack Cinder integration that allows OpenStack instances to use the storage hosted by Veritas Access.

  • OpenStack Manila integration that lets you share Veritas Access file systems with virtual machines on OpenStack Manila.

Quotas

Support for setting file system quotas, user quotas, and hard quotas.

Replication

Periodic replication of data over IP networks.

See the episodic(1) man page for more information.

Synchronous replication of data over IP networks

See the continuous(1) man page for more information.

Support for LDAP, NIS, and AD

Veritas Access uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for user authentication.

Partition Directory

With support for partitioned directories, directory entries are redistributed into various hash directories. These hash directories are not visible in the name-space view of the user or operating system. For every new create, delete, or lookup, this feature performs a lookup for the respective hashed directory and performs the operation in that directory. This leaves the parent directory inode and its other hash directories unobstructed for access, which vastly improves file system performance.

By default this feature is not enabled. See the storage_fs(1) manual page to enable this feature.

Isolated storage pools

Enables you to create an isolated storage pool with a self-contained configuration. An isolated storage pool protects the pool from losing the associated metadata even if all the configuration disks in the main storage pool fail.

Performance and tuning

Workload-based tuning for the following workloads:

  • Media server - Streaming media represents a new wave of rich Internet content. Recent advancements in video creation, compression, caching, streaming, and other content delivery technology have brought audio and video together to the Internet as rich media. You can use Veritas Access to store your rich media, videos, movies, audio, music, and photos.

  • Virtual machine support

  • Other workloads