SRB 2012

SRB 2012 offers major enhancements including:

  • Cloud Support: SRB now supports both storage and MCAT in the cloud. This allows Data Object storage and migration to the cloud (Amazon S3) and hosting of the MCAT database in the cloud (Amazon RDS).
  • MCAT Schema: A more efficient MCAT database schema can now handle more files, is highly scalable in clustered relational databases, and was expanded with additional system-level metadata attributes.
  • MCAT Replication: MCATs can now be configured to replicate their metadata to each other in near-real-time fashion automatically resolving conflicts and re-synchronizing after offline periods.
  • Time Zone Support: MCATs can now be configured to run in different time zones displaying time and date information to clients in their native time zone.
  • HSM Support: The HSM commands "archive", "stage", and "purge" are now integrated with SRB file drivers and SRB bulk mechanisms; the ILM Daemon can now also perform HSM data management operations based on policies.
  • Sync Daemon: A completely rewritten Sync Daemon is now fully threaded and can now handle real-time synchronization of SAM-QFS file systems including HSM metadata synchronization. The Sync Daemon now also has a new Check Mode, which compares existing file system trees with SRB Collection trees and reports any discrepancies without actually making modifications to either side.
  • ILM Daemon: The ILM Daemon policies are now fully threaded so they no longer interfere with each other when running at the same time.
  • Metadata Daemon: There is now support for automatically generating XML out of extracted metadata and associating it with Data Objects. The Daemon also has new association methods, which permit association of the parsed metadata with a Parent Collection or with a secondary data file.
  • Stream Daemon: A new Stream Daemon was added to perform network streaming, chopping, and re-streaming operations.
  • IPv6 Support: The next generation Internet protocol IPv6 is now supported by SRB Servers and Clients.
  • MySQL Database Support: The MCAT can now be a MySQL database. SRB 2012 also supports MySQL databases as database objects.
  • Distributed Lock Servers: Removing bottlenecks and single-points of failures, there is now more than one Lock Server and Lock Servers can now be distributed to as many storage systems as managed by SRB.
  • Metadata Management: The new Metadata Attribute types "boolean", "binary", and "float", "flag", and "long" were added; the "timestamp" Metadata Attribute type now replaces the old "date" type and now maps to a real timestamp data type in the MCAT database; new Column Kinds replace the former Column Types "creator", "string_list", and "view"; new System Metadata Schemes are automatically applied to ALL new Data Objects and Collections; different types of defaults can be applied to SRB Objects using the following
    priority: restricted default attributes, user-specified values, user specified defaults, inherited values from parent directory, administrator-specified defaults, and NULL.
  • Token Management: a new BitContextType token allows for the assignment of meaningful strings for bit flag values now used throughout SRB.
  • User Management: SRB Users and Locations can now be managed across multiple Domains with multiple aliases. This allows for a single person to have
    multiple accounts across multiple administrative domains. In SRB 2012 Locations are now assigned to Domains whereas before they had Parent Locations. SRB Users are automatically added when in EXTERNAL_AUTH or KERBEROS_AUTH mode. This greatly eases user management.
  • UNIX Preserve Mode: In this mode UNIX owner, group owner, and mode can be preserved in SRB and can be re-applied when retrieving data from SRB.
  • Security: role-based access control was implemented for many tasks that were previously reserved for the Super User. There are now a number of system groups (e.g., create_users, deploy_executables) that facilicate assignment of administrative users to certain roles.
  • Passwords: clear-text password storage has been eliminated completely from the system.
  • Mandatory Access Control: In addition to the traditional Discretionary Access Control, SRB 2012 supports MAC on Data Objects, Users, and Resources. This prevents the involuntary declassification of information.
  • Fail-over: Multiple levels of fail-over are now making SRB communications and operations more reliable surviving MCAT Server or SRB Agent failures.
  • SRB Protocol: The SRB Protocol was made more efficient using fewer frames and being more resilient to network failures.
  • Data Transfer Protocols: Support was added for all of the following protocols (read and write): HTTP, HTTPS, HTTPS Amazon S3, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and SCP.
  • Acommands: The command-line administrative commands can now be executed in bulk. This greatly speeds-up large numbers of administrative tasks.
  • Administration: The Java Admin GUI has seen a major overhaul with a more intuitive organization of all administrative objects into logically organized namespaces in the left-hand tree. The main panel has received wizards for object creation and now uses tabs to organize object properties.
  • Unique identifiers: administrators can now optionally specify a preferred unique ID (used as a primary key in the MCAT database) upon creation of Users, Groups, Domains, Locations, and Resources.
  • Resource Limits: administrators are now able to specify soft quota, hard quota, low watermark, and high watermark on a per-resource basis.
  • SDK: Several new APIs for SRB administration were added including an entirely new mechanism for creating and submitting administrative bulk requests. Also, there were several additional Client Bulk APIs for modifying Objects and associating them with Schemes. Please refer to the SDK Release Notes for details.
  • SDK Language Bindings: new language bindings were added for the following languages: Perl, PHP, and Python.
  • Debugging and Logging: All log files now contain information about the user causing log entries to be created. This greatly eases troubleshooting in production and large-user environments. Also, SRB clients can now increase the server log level by simply specifying a higher verbosity level on the client side. This eases troubleshooting without having to adjust server logging levels.
  • Containers: SRB Container support was removed entirely starting with SRB 2012.
  • Many other bug fixes and ease of use enhancements.

The SRB 2012 SP1 release contains the following new features:

  • MCAT Updater 8: use SRB 2012 SP1 to update from SRB 2008.
  • Windows virtual disk: performance improvements through caching enhancements.
  • Numerous bug fixes. Please contact us for details.

The SRB 2012 R2 release contains the following new features:

  • New SRB Server pre-spawn design to make more efficient use of resources and to respond more quickly to incoming client connections. This new design supports hundreds of simultaneous client connections.
  • New SRB Sync Daemon for both walk- and real-time mode file system synchronization with checksumming (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, etc.) capability, multi-threading, automatic file system metadata extraction, and summary reporting.

The SRB 2008 SP2 release contains the following new features:

  • MCAT Updater 9: use SRB 2012 SP2 to update from SRB 2012 SP1.
  • MCAT: A new federation-wide flag SRB_AUTO_ADD_USERS_ENABLED was added so that SRB's behavior on automated new user creation can be controlled for
    authentication mechanisms such as KERBEROS_AUTH and EXTERNAL_AUTH.
  • SRB Server: To change federation-wide MCAT configurations, only 'write' access is now required. 'All' access used to be necessary for this operation.
  • Drivers: The URL driver has a new configuration parameter URL_FTP_MODE, which can be used to set the FTP protocol's mode to either passive or active.
  • Scommands:
    - Many Scommands now have a -nopreserve option, which indicates the client's desire not to preserve file system attributes. If the -preserve or -nopreserve flags are not set, the MCAT_PRESERVE_UNIX_INFO_ENABLED flag takes effect federation-wide.
    - The Sls command has a new -select argument, which allows for customization of the selected columns. The column names are identical to attribute names used in -policy arguments. Up to five attributes can be specified separated by a space character.
  • A number of bug fixes. Please contact us for details.

Take a look at SRB Features for a high-level view of SRB's capabilities.