Create an Object Store on Unity

Hello everyone. Welcome to a another video in the How To Series. Today, we're looking at how to create an object store on Unity.

So let's get straight into it. So if I just minimize that, obviously, I've already done a few steps. We've already got a Unity storage array configured ready to go, etc, etc. But I just want to really cut to the chase and get straight into creating an object store.

So all we do is we click on storage at the top of the toolbar, there storage, and then down to object store.

Now, at the moment, obviously there isn't one created, but it's easy to do. Just select the Create object store and the top right hand corner. And then, really, it's probably advised to give this a sensible storage name for the pool, a decent pool name. So I'm just going to go for, I mean, let's just go objects right now. You have to allocate it to a resource group, normally for load balancing. You know, if you've got maybe a whole bunch of file storage, or even block storage, and you might want to separate this onto a different pool, resource group, different controller, just just for load balancing, okay, but I'm going to stick with the the dot 58 address, and then we're going to allocate some storage.

So it's important to say at this point that any object stores need to reside on their own pool.

So if you have a pool already and it contains either file or block storage, then you can't, kind of, you can't add s3 object storage to it, okay, so have two separate pools. In other words, okay. So even if at a later date, you've already got your file and your block storage already there, you want to kind of, add some object storage. You may need to purchase some more disks, create some extra volumes, create some extra pools, etc, etc.

So make sure it's a separate pool. But with that said, I'm just going to click on allocate again. I've only got those kind of the single volume here, but whatever you've got, you can allocate, you can remove, you can decide exactly what storage you wish to allocate to the object store. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on Next, and else, per usual, has any kind of Unity pool you need to allocate read and write fast here to it so slightly, slightly out of date. Yeah, revision here. So there's no right here, so I'll just click on read. It just means the other one will be allocated to write, but hopefully you guys will have a right box that you can select there. So I'm just going to go with one read, click on Next, and then it will tell you,

So we've got this object data. So that prefix is obviously the name that you gave to the pool. You might not see it very clearly, but it says object data. Okay, so whatever you name the pool, it's going to be added into the prefix there for the file systems. This is kind of important as well, so automatically, we will enable TLS for you. Okay, it's just critical when obviously transferring data to and from just to make sure that you have encryption enabled for any data that's in flight. Okay, so happy with all of that. I'm just going to go ahead and click on Next, and then it just gives you a summary. So just check everything. Make sure you're happy with everything. Nothing kind of stands out as glaringly wrong or anything like that. And as long as you're happy, just go ahead and click Create. Now this takes a few it takes a few minutes to do Okay, not too long. So we'll just let this go through.

Okay, there we go. Started to go.

Once it starts, the rest of it is completed pretty quickly, to be honest. Okay, once it's done, you'll be presented with this screen, just so you know, everything was created successfully, and everything looks good. So a few things to kind of note here the browser access, okay? So that's what you'll click on to actually gain access and to the object store, but also access key and secret key, which is essentially username and password, right? But what we'll do, and let's go ahead and click on the browser access, okay, yeah, that's fine. We're just gonna we trust it. We trust it, and then you're presented with the Welcome to console.

Now this is min IO, okay, so this is a self hosted service in which you can obviously log into and that will then present you with the buckets, okay, but this is what I mean by username and password. So all we need to do is hop back to Unity, click on the handy kind of copy button, go back to min IO and paste. You can see here some that I made earlier with the drop down menu back to Unity, and then copy the secret key back to min IO and put that into the password.

Once you're happy with that, click on login. Hopefully that'll work, and there you go, straight into it.

Obviously, this is a vanilla build, so no buckets have been created yet, or anything like that. So you can create a bucket, or click there to create a bucket, but you can see min IO is a very powerful tool. There's lots of features and different things that you can kind of go through and configure the. I'm not going to, you know, say that I'm an IO expert, but you guys might be. So go ahead and look around and see what you want to configure. But let's get straight into creating a bucket. So I'm just going to go create bucket. Now, bucket. Name, name. This something sensibly. I did notice previously that it's not a fan of things like uppercase. I don't know how it was with special characters you could try it, but I'm just going to put data in for now, just for just for ease of the other video.

And then you've got a few more different options. So you've got versioning, okay, so if you want to keep multiple versions of the same file, you may want to roll back to an older version, even for recovery, something like that. It's a good idea to kind of switch that on. Okay, object lock in. So this is, this is really vital, okay. So if you've got anything that requires any kind of immutability, it could be essential data, anything that requires, you know, keeping, basically, you can switch that on.

Now, there might be some cases where the application that you're using will have some advice on that they may want. They might want to handle the object locking themselves, I don't know. Okay, so just check with the application that you're using whether or not to turn that off or on. Okay? And then, if you want to limit the amount of data in the bucket, probably a good idea. If you want to keep control of, you know the storage and how much is being used, probably a good idea to do that and then retention. So retention is actually linked to the immutability, the object locking, okay, so if I switch that on, that will, in turn be switched on. There is compliance in government. Can't say IT governance mode. I won't bore you with the differences there. But you can, you can look that up, to be honest with you, but, but what is, what is probably quite important to say, is, whatever you set here, guys, it is fairly set in stone. Okay, so what I mean by that is, don't just go ahead and set that for, you know, 99 years, the way that unity and this solution has been designed, is that it is truly immutable. So if you make the if you make the object store the bucket, immutable, then you're stuck. You can't just go ahead and delete it. You can't even delete the underlying, you know, disk array or anything like that. You are stuck with it. So just be careful. Just be sensible. Don't set it to anything. That means you're going to be stuck, okay, but again, you'll get some guidelines on this from the business or the application that you're trying to use, or anything like that.

Once you've got that set, just click on Create bucket. Doesn't take long, and it's pretty much done. Okay? So there's no data in it the moment, and from that point, it's kind of, it's just there now for you to, kind of, upload data, download data, whatever you want to do. So if I click on Upload, it will just take me to the local machine. So you can see I've created a file here. But if I select data for my bucket and click on Open, it will upload it to that bucket. And then you can access that elsewhere within the business. If you've got another user in another department that wants to access it, they can, and that's how it's designed.

So that's it, really, that's it for kind of creating an object store. As you can see, it's very simple to go through, gets you access to min IO, and then you've got a whole kind of bunch of different different things and items that you can configure and change within min IO. But that's it for now. So hopefully, hopefully that was useful.

Join us again on the next video.

Thanks guys.
Cheers.