Data Access

To facilitate a seamless access to the Buyers’ distributed data sets, the project uses Onedata global data management system.

Onedata infrastructure, spanning multiple clouds, consists of two components - Onezone and Oneprovider, and user level Oneclient tool for the data access. Each Buyer Group has a single Onezone instance and per cloud instance of Oneprovider. Oneproviders attach to the Cloud’s data stores and connect to Onezone, with the latter being the main entry point and enabling the global authentication and metadata management.

At this time, it is assumed that the distributed Onedata infrastructure is already deployed by the Buyer’s Group Data Coordinators and the endpoints of Onezone and Oneproviders are available.

Using Nuvla to provision data access client

Users access their data on VMs using POSIX. The data becomes available on the VMs via mounting the required data sources with the help of Oneclient tool. When deploying VMs via Nuvla service, users should use or, when building their own components, inherit from oneclient-<OS> components, which are available at https://nuv.la/module/HNSciCloud/onedata.

At the moment, for oneclinet to mount the data volumes on VMs and enable POSIX access to the data, users need to provide it with a data access token and the Cloud local Oneprovider endpoint.

Next versions of the platform will be extended to contain the auto-discovery of the Cloud local Oneprovider as well as auto-generation of the data access token.

Obtaining Onedata data Access Token

The following steps are required to get the data access token

  • obtain the Buyer’s Group Onezone endpoint
  • in Onezone, authenticate via FedIdP
../_images/onezone-login.png

.

  • when logged in Onezone web user interface, press Access Tokens in the top menu and press Create new access token button, then click on the copy pictogram
../_images/dataaccess-gen-token.png

The copied data access token should be used with the access-token parameter in the oneclient component deployment.

Obtaining Oneprovider endpoint

Check with your Data Manger for the IP/DNS name of the Oneprovider endpoint on the Cloud of your choice.

Oneprovider IP can also be easily copied from the Onezone ‘world’ view by clicking on the icon of selected Oneprovider instance and pressing copy button in the top right corner of the popup:

../_images/onezone-provider-ip.png

Provision VM for data access

Here it is explained on the example of CentOS 7 image. Go to https://nuv.la/module/HNSciCloud/onedata/oneclient-centos7 and click on Deploy.

../_images/oneclient-deploy.png

Select the Cloud on which you want to deploy the client via Cloud drop-down. Provide access-token and provider-hostname parameters. Optionally change the default mount point of the spaces in mount-point parameter. Then, click Deploy Application Component button.

Accessing data on VM

After the successful deployment, user should expect the spaces (supported by the selected provider) with the files available for POSIX access under mount-point. Example

# ls -1 /mnt/onedata/
space-s3
space-gluster
# ls -1 /mnt/onedata/space-s3
test.txt
#

External documentation

More information on how to

  • access, manage and share your data;
  • create groups of users with fine grained access rights;
  • share and collaborate on your data

can be found in Onedata User quickstart and the User guide.