Advanced storage areas

An advanced storage area provides high availability content storage and disaster recovery through use of replication and replica repair. This capability is accomplished without relying on any special features of the underlying storage devices, so advanced storage areas can be applied to commodity storage. An advanced storage area leverages the Content Platform Engine sweep and server communication services for replication, content deletion, and abandoned content backout. For more information, see Advantages of advanced storage areas.

An advanced storage area supports heterogeneous storage devices. S3 cloud storage and file system storage can be used as an advanced storage area.

A single advanced storage area can have multiple advanced storage devices that are connected to it. For example, you can have an S3 storage device and two file system storage devices that are connected to an advanced storage area. Each one of these devices is a replica in the advanced storage area. In addition, a single storage device can be used by multiple advanced storage areas within the same object store. So the same S3 storage device can be connected to two advanced storage areas.

An advanced storage area exists as a peer of the other storage area types that can be set on an object store: database, file system, and fixed content storage. You can move data between an advanced storage area and the other types of storage areas. And as with these other storage area types, you can assign advanced storage areas to storage policies.