¶ What is Rio Broker?
Rio Broker is essentially a data mover originally designed for the Media and Entertainment industry but with very broad application. It was designed to be an independent data mover designed specifically to archive and restore data to and from various sources - we call them endpoints - to various archives like tape, disk, cloud
¶ Why you need Rio Broker
A specific built data mover results in higher throughputs, better availability, more visibility, and more control of your workflow. At the same time, Rio, as part of the overall Spectra Logic ecosystem, creates huge savings in total cost of ownership - Lower legacy middleware support costs, simple use of industry cost leading archive media options like tape, direct integration with multiple clouds and multiple sites as you look to the future of cloud based editing and orchestration
¶ Key Features
With similar functionality to legacy “middleware” like Front Porch Digital's Diva and SGL's Flashnet systems, Rio has the ability to offload the complex task of managing your data without having to rely on a MAM to keep track of data locality or relying on MAM software to efficiently move and track data placement.
But Rio takes data management to a new level:
- Real time visibility into object placement/job status
- Ability to add metadata as an integral part of the storage system
- Provides a simple way to archive and restore data manually both for smaller installations without a MAM and as a backup to an overlay MAM system
- Plug in option for Partial File Recovery
- Distributed watch folder engine plug in with auto and sidecar metadata tagging
- Integration with Spectra's Vail multi-cloud/multi-site software to allow global, single namespace data placement and access
¶ Key Parts of Rio Broker
Endpoints are places to move data from - Think of these as sources.
Supported Endpoints:
- NAS
- Local Storage
- Any storage that can be mounted with a client e.g. AVID Nexis, GPFS, Lustre
- any FTP server
- S3 bucket (tested with AWS and some local S3 sources)
- any BlackPearl (DS3) bucket
Agents are places to move data into - Think of these as archives - but so much more.
Each “Agent” is essentially a driver for a specific storage system which normally contains not just a storage location but metadata about the objects and normally has its own way of saving or restoring data. Rio “mounts” these systems using an “Agent” written for it and allows complex data movement into and out of the storage controlled by that system. Agents are also responsible for the complex migration interaction described later.
Supported Agents:
- BlackPearl (DS3) presenting tape or disk archive
- S3 targets (tested with AWS and others)
- Vail/BlackPearl S3 (Multi-site multi-cloud virtual object storage)
- Diva Agent
- Flashnet Agent
- NAS Agent (coming soon)
Brokers are logical constructs which have one or many agents associated with them. Brokers serve as the workers of the system, handling data movement between Agents and Endpoints.
Supported Brokers:
- BlackPearl
- Vail
Devices are storage systems which are configured at a top-level, with shares and buckets within the system being configured as Agents.
Supported Devices:
- BlackPearl
- Vail
- Diva
- Flashnet
- Time-Based PFR