The Content Gateway platform architecture is comprised of hardware and software components.toc

Client

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Applications and

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Users

Client applications use the Gateway over a network and communicate via the SCSP storage protocol or another protocol such as S3 translated by a protocol personality. Client applications include common web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, or software from third-party ISVs, or custom in-house software developed by clients. Users are people utilizing client application software communicating with Gateway. The implication is users are making use of one or more client applications to interact with Gateway.

Load

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Balancer

Load balancer appliances are a common method for automatically distributing client requests across all Gateways and for excluding Gateways offline due to failure or maintenance when deploying more than one Gateway. Load balancers may optionally implement upstream features such as SSL/TLS end-point termination, protocol firewall rules, quality of service, and geographic traffic management.

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The load-balancing layer is optional for Gateway, and, while hardware appliance load balancers can be well-suited for sites with heavy traffic and sophisticated operational requirements, it is also possible to implement this layer using virtual machines or modest hardware running open-source software. For example, the Pound reverse proxy running on Linux provides transport encryption and load balancing with Layer 7 inspection capabilities.

Protocol

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Personalities

Protocol personalities are optional protocol translators allowing client applications to communicate using a different storage protocol than SCSP. By translating communications in this manner, all client applications, regardless of the protocol they use, share the same content in the back-end cluster and they utilize a common authentication/ACL scheme. An analogy for this universal storage protocol access is ODBC for database communications.

The SCSP and S3 protocol handling is implemented natively within the Gateway. Third-party or user-developed personalities may also be added to, or in front of, the Gateway server.

Gateway

The Gateway is a value-added front-end for the Swarm storage cluster. At the core, it is a stateless reverse proxy deployed in an n+1 configuration for horizontal scaling and high availability. The value-added features provided by the Gateway enhance the Swarm SCSP client protocol and provide storage management and protection for the back-end storage cluster.

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• Integrity Seal hash-type upgrades

• Trailing Content-MD5 headers

• Status
  colour Red title Deprecated

  Swarm legacy auth/auth mechanism

• Swarm legal hold mechanism

Metadata

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Search Servers

Elasticsearch servers provide a NoSQL data query engine enabling metadata searching with the Swarm storage cluster. The query engine software allows for n+1 deployments providing horizontal scalability for load sharing and high availability.

See Elasticsearch for Swarm.

Swarm

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Storage Cluster

The Swarm storage cluster provides a scalable object storage engine for the Gateway platform. The storage engine consists of standard x86 hardware that manages and protects storage for multiple tenants.

See Storage Implementation and  and Swarm Storage Cluster.

Remote

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Replication

The Swarm replication feeds between clusters can be used with Gateway in the following deployment scenarios:

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