S3 Compatible Storage

This page provides a guide to configuring S3 Compatible storage as a Storage Target in Verba.

S3 has been remarkably successful and is the foundation for many well-known services such as Dropbox and Pinterest.  Part of the reason for this success has been the flexibility of object stores compared to standard block and file protocols. From a user perspective, these protocols give little in the way of controlling how the data is stored and managed (they only support basic I/O commands like read, write, open and close).

S3, on the other hand, is all about object-level management and manipulation. With S3 you can describe how you want to store objects, encrypt them, present them (even as a website) and much more. Each object is validated during I/O operations, unlike a file system (NFS/SMB) which does data integrity checking only at the entire file system level.

In addition to the management capabilities are the relative ease in which data can be stored in the system, the underlying storage infrastructure isn’t exposed to the customer. Instead, access is provided through a set of programming interfaces, commonly called the S3 API.  It’s through a combination of features, simplicity, and ubiquity of this API that S3 has been so successful.

For a general description of storage targets, please refer to Storage and export targets.

Creating an S3 Compatible storage target

Follow the steps below to create a new Verba Storage target for S3 Compatible storage target:

Step 1 - Open the Verba Web interface then select Data > Storage Targets from the top menu.

Step 2 - Click on Add New Storage Target

Step 3 - Fill out the configuration form according to the requirements in the following table.

Step 4 - Click Save to save the settings

TLS connection configuration in Verba

If a TLS connection is to be established between Verba and Amazon S3, then the necessary certificates and keys need to be configured in the Verba server configuration.

In the Verba menu, navigate to System > Verba Servers, select the appropriate server, then click on the Change Configuration tab.

On this tab, fill out the configuration under Storage Management -> Storage Targets -> S3 Compatible. See the table below for reference.