Happy 2018 everyone! I wanted to share something I have been testing at the request of a few customers that have been interested in using Tintri Cloud Connector. I will preface this with the simple statement that this is currently unsupported, however I am working on that within the Tintri walls. What makes Tintri Cloud Connector unique is that it natively interacts with the S3 API. Therefore, as long as an S3 target is 100% S3 API compliant there is no reason I have found for this not to work. In fact, I have tested with multiple targets as you will see.
When Tintri Cloud Connector was first released last year the integration was for AWS S3 in their public cloud and for IBM Cloud Object Storage which is essentially on premises S3 target. So I got to thinking…..as did a few customers, what about other S3 compliant targets such as:
- Minio (used in products like FreeNAS or stand alone)
- Cloudian
- Dell EMC ECS
- Scality S3 Server
- Cohesity S3
- Ceph (Tested by a Co-Worker)
Most of these have been requested by one or more customers so I decided to give things a try to stand as many of them up as possible. As of today I have almost all of them running with successful replication from Tintri VMstores, and I have also tested the download restores. So what’s the trick to making all these work? It’s rather simple if you want to try it. In a past blog post I showed how to configure Tintri Cloud Connector for AWS S3. To set up these other options you simply use the IBM COS option.
For each solution the specifics such as the endpoint and port will vary as will the keys of course. Generally here is a few of the vendors formats I have tested for reference.
- (Minio) http://<ip_Address or hostname>:9000
- (Scality S3) http://<ip_Address or hostname>:8000
- (Cloudian) http://<MUST BE FQDN>
- (DELL EMC ECS) http://<ip_Address or hostname>:9020
- (Ceph) http://<ip_Address or hostname>:7480
In all but one in the case of Cloudian can you use the IP address or hostname. They specifically require some added DNS and the use of FQDN. Also some of these have HTTPS options as well, but the takeaway here is the format for all must be http(s)://<ip_Address or hostname>:<Port> in the Admin and Data End point. In all my test cases the same was used for both and it’s working fine. From there you configure the replication same as I showed in the previous article and point to the new on premises S3 target. Below you can see an example of a machine replicating to Cloudian
You can also replicate to more than one cloud destination, however it it important to point out that the current maximum number of cloud destinations is four. If you are currently running Tintri Global Center 3.7 and Tintri OS 4.4 you have access to test out Tintri Cloud Connector. Now if you also have an on premises S3 target either including the ones I have tested or not you can give this a try. There is multiple use cases why customers want to use Cloud Connector in this way and having access to more on premises S3 target options is very useful.
Once more testing is done I hope to get some official support for most if not all of these other 100% compliant S3 API targets. It’s actually pretty cool to get some of these stood up for various other reasons. Oh and if you are a Mac user Cyberduck is a life saver and worth the money in the Mac App Store!