Alba

Alba (ALternative BAckend) is a distributed object store, like Swift, Ceph and Amplistor. Alba is highly optimised for Open vStorage and aggregates a set of OSDs like Alba's ASDs or Seagate's Kinetic Drives into a pool of storage that you can use as a storage backend for Open vStorage.

Alba supports the following high-end set of features:

• erasure coding
• replication
• (optional) compression
• (optional) encryption
• partial reads
• namespaces
• repair
• rebalancing
• flash acceleration
• global and local recovery
• ...

Unlike most alternatives, Alba is a consistent store. Since it is optimised for the types of objects Open vStorage's volume driver needs to store and retrieve, Alba has become the default object storage backend for Open vStorage.

This also means Alba is not a general purpose object store. Currently, you might have problems storing gigabyte size objects.

License

ALBA is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

Documentation

You can consult a GitBook with all ALBA documenation online by visiting https://openvstorage.gitbooks.io/alba.

Building Alba

see COMPILING

Installing Alba

You need the Alba binary on all machines you want to run an alba component. We provide debian and redhat packages

Playing Around

Developers can set up an alba environment on their local machine using the available setup script:

$> ./setup/setup.native nil
...

Alba's typically used from within a program (C++, OCaml) but there's a command line interface too.

$> ./ocaml/alba.native list-namespaces --config=cfg/test.ini
...
Found the following namespaces: [("demo",
  { Albamgr_protocol.Protocol.Namespace.id = 0l; nsm_host_id = "ricky";
    state = Albamgr_protocol.Protocol.Namespace.Active;
    preset_name = "default" })]

Uploading an object

$> ./ocaml/alba.native upload-object demo ./<some file> <OBJECT_NAME>

Downloading an object

$> ./ocaml/alba.native download-object demo <OBJECT_NAME> <the_file> --config=cfg/test.ini

You can administer a whole alba cluster via the command line but you probably want to use OpenVStorage's GUI for this.

Architecture

more information on design choices and how it all works is explained here