Dell DX6000 Application Manual

Also see for DX6000: Manual Supplementary guide Hardware installation instructions Hardware owner's manual Administration guide

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Copyright © 2010 Caringo, Inc.All rights reserved 5Version 5.0December 2010Currently, DX Storage understands only one application-level protocol, the Simple Content StorageProtocol (SCSP), which is a subset of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP/1.1 used by webservers and browsers. While it is possible that additional access protocols will be added to DXStorage in the future, HTTP is the only protocol supported for the URI at this time.A DX Storage cluster is addressed using either the DNS name or the IP address of one of thenodes in the cluster. It doesn't matter which node is addressed initially, as long as it is accessibleto the application on the network. Of course, if the addressed node has failed, or is offline for somereason, your URI might need to change. Note that it is not necessary that the node named in theURI be the same one that actually stored the object in the first place because any node can beasked to retrieve any object stored on any other node in the cluster.For unnamed objects, the UUID of an object to be retrieved from a DX Storage cluster is specifiedin the last component of the URI as a string of 32 case-insensitive hexadecimal digits. The lengthof the UUID string must always be exactly 32 characters (any leading zeros must be included).When storing an object for the first time, obviously there is no UUID assigned yet. Therefore, aWRITE request in SCSP includes just the first two components of the URI. After the data has beentransferred and stored, DX Storage generates and returns a new UUID to the application.1.8. About Objects and SecurityStarting with DX Storage version 5.0, you can optionally use security with named and unnamedobjects. You can, for example, enable only users in a particular security realm to make changes toan object and prevent any other users from changing the object. You can apply security to bucketsand to named or unnamed objects.The following figure shows a simple example of using security.In the example, the user Joe has access to the docs bucket where he can create named objectsand user Jim has access to the videos bucket. Neither Joe nor Jim can write named objects to anyother domain in the cluster (cloud.com).1.8.1. The Basics of DX Storage SecurityDX Storage's security model uses the standard two-part approach of:• Authentication: DX Storage uses standard Digest Access Authentication as discussed in RFC2617 to create one-way cryptographic hash algorithms to obscure identity information overthe Internet while allowing a client (for example, a web browser) and the DX Storage server toexchange enough information to consummate authentication.DX Storage validates user names and passwords from a security realm, which is discussed in thenext section.• Authorization: Provided a user authenticates successfully, the user's privileges are derivedfrom the authorization specification associated with the object the user attempts to access. Theauthorization specification is discussed in the next section.