Sun Microsystems 5800 manual System Overview, System Summary

5800 System Overview

In 5800 system version 1.1, an attempt to store a value that is longer than the associated field generates an immediate error.

5800 System Overview

This section provides an overviews of the 5800 system, the 5800 system history, and a summaries of the key points of the 5800 system usage model.

The following topics are discussed:

■“5800 System Summary” on page 16

■“The 5800 System and Honeycomb” on page 17

■“The 5800 System Data Model” on page 17

■“The 5800 System Metadata Model” on page 19

■“The 5800 System Query Model” on page 20

■“The 5800 System Query Integrity Model” on page 21

■“Deleting Objects from the 5800 System” on page 22

5800 System Summary

The 5800 system is an object-based storage archive appliance for fixed-content data and metadata. The 5800 system is designed from the ground up to be reliable, affordable, and scalable, and to integrate data storage with intelligent data retrieval. It is designed to store huge amounts of data for decades at a time. At that scale, issues of how and where the data is stored — and how that changes over time — can be quite cumbersome. The 5800 system usage model is designed to manage those issues for you, so that your application can deal with just the data.

A custom Application Programming Interface (the 5800 Client API) is provided so that your applications can take advantage of all the features in the 5800 system usage model. The API provides the following capabilities:

■Store a new object into the archive (storeObject)

■Associate a new metadata record with stored object data (storeMetadata)

■Retrieve the data from an object that was previously stored (retrieveData)

■Retrieve the metadata from an object that was previously stored (retrieveMetadata)

■Delete an object (delete)

■Query for matching objects given a query expression of specific object characteristics (query)

The 5800 system API Release 1.1 provides two APIs:

■The Java API is described in Chapter 2, “Sun StorageTek 5800 System Java Client API”

■The C API is described in Chapter 3, “Sun StorageTek 5800 System C Client API”

16 Sun StorageTek 5800 System Client API Reference Manual • June 2008