Nirvana, as a member of the EMC Partner Program, ensures that SRB works seamlessly with Centera and other EMC hardware by building a Global Namespace across heterogeneous and distributed storage systems.
About Centera
Centera, an award-winning hardware solution, is a content addressed storage solution (CAS), providing scalable and secure storage, as well as an active archive for online access to fixed content.
Centera's architecture is based on redundant arrays of independent nodes (RAIN) offering petabyte scalability. To add capacity is easy; Centera auto-discovers and configures the new capacity as it is installed. Data on Centera is not accessed directly through a file system, but through the Centera Software Development Kit.
Centera continuously monitors to detect and repair soft errors. It also automatically reconfigures itself and replicates objects as necessary if hardware failures occur such as—disks or nodes—which are automatically reported through EMC's remote monitoring system.
Centera and SRB
The combination of Centera and SRB provides a very powerful online archive and data grid solution that is transparently accessed by all applications enterprise-wide. Data is automatically migrated, replicated, deleted, and backed-up between Centera and other storage systems based on policies set by SRB Administrators. The entire data grid can be administered from a central console and is also accessible through the web.
SRB's security layer is ensuring that data on Centera and all other storage systems can only be seen, read, modified, or deleted by the appropriate users, groups, or domains of users. SRB's secure query mechanism allows the discovery of data enterprise-wide, whether it's physically stored on Centera or any other storage system.
Transparent Access
There are various SRB Interfaces that provide transparent access to SRB's Global Namespace. Windows users and applications are able to transparently store and retrieve data from Centera through SRB's CIFS Gateway. UNIX or Linux applications can mount SRB Collections through NFS mounts on their local systems. With SRB doing all the work behind the scenes, data access and management becomes easy and effortless.