File Storage Service - Remote Deployment options

@Mathias Dahl any thoughts?

I don't know, sorry.

@chanaka-shanil, any comments?

File Storage For Remote is planned for IFS Cloud 23R1.

@chanaka-shanil Will the remote FSS in 23R1 include blob storage of customers choice or do they need to use a IFS specific blob storage location?

Any other options other then Blob?

/Christer

@ChristerM 

In 23R1, in Remote deployment, the FS (please drop the last S there) we plan to support “local” file storage via the SMB protocol (the protocol used when using network file shares in Windows, also supported on Linux). So no support for “blob storage”.

Thanks, will blob be supported later on?. I can see that customers that run remote are doing that in Azure and would like to be as serverless as possible, avoiden file servers or file shares.

We have not planned to provide blob support for Remote customers. But will take this feedback

@chanaka-shanil In your above comments, it was mentioned FS Will be available in 23R1. Is it released now?

When was the SMB protocol invented and witch century are we in at them moment? You like to state that you utilize the newest technology why not create a solution with the newest technology and let the customer decide what kind of storage to use for the remote solution to?

@Mathias Dahl We have shared repository options since 21R1, then what is the difference between the shared repositories and the latest solution SMB protocol shares?

This will be with 23R1 GA.

We have chosen SMB based on input we have got and most customer could use this without much change to their existing infrastructure. Also keeping in mind that this needs to be support on air gapped installations. But this doesn’t mean we will only support SMB going forward. Based on input we can add other storage backends. 

The idea with the file storage is that it acts as an abstraction to the consumers of it. So, the consumer doesn’t need to care about the internal details of what it takes to store or retrieve a file from storage. In the case of DOCMAN, it only knows that files are stored in the FS, but it doesn’t know(care) if it’s Azure or Disk or whatever.

Good question! Chanaka has touched that in his reply but I will comment too. The different is subtle, for a customer, since anyway a shared folder needs to be setup, access arranged for, etc. As long as we have both options, the differences are where you configure the shared location, and how granular the configuration can be. In Docman, as you know, we can have one repository per class, if we want to, or one repository for all classes, or a mix. With the new solution things will actually be a bit less flexible since there will only be ONE shared location, not several which we support in Docman. My hope is that it might be more stable and easier to setup and troubleshoot though, since we are now using a standard functionality in Kubernetes, not our home made solution (granted, we do use a popular third party library for accessing the share, but still).

My goal is to get rid of some options in Docman, now that File Storage supports both Cloud and Remote deployment. I argue that we don't need all the options we have now (Database, Shared, FTP and File Storage). Database plus an "external" option should really be enough. Sure, it's very flexible now, but with flexibility also comes complexity, in our case. I hope that those two options will be enough going forward. Either you keep your documents in the database because it's very secure, very easy to administer, setup and backup. Or you keep your documents out of the database, saving database storage space. The latter gives speedier backups and recovery, plus cheaper storage costs if you use cloud storage for your database. It does "complicate" recovery though, since the database and the external storage will be two different data sources that needs to be kept in sync.
 

@chanaka-shanil, Can you please confirm that this has been released with 23R1? I checked the Technical Documentation and the News Presentations and could not find any reference to it in these.

Sorry for the very late reply. Yes, this is released now with GA. Documentation can be found here: https://docs.ifs.com/techdocs/23r1/070_remote_deploy/400_installation_options/120_file_storage_for_remote/