Advanced storage areas offer several advantages over other types of storage areas.
Advanced storage areas have two main advantages over other storage areas: They support content replication over storage devices, and they offer storage on OpenStack-based cloud objects. Advanced storage areas also offer direct content upload. That is, content uploaded by a client application to an advanced storage area goes directly to a storage device without needing to be written to temporary storage.
Content Platform Engine can replicate content to more than one type of storage device and to multiple instances of the same type. Mounting of file system replicas between sites is not required. If Content Platform Engine determines that it has connectivity to a cross-site replica, it reads or writes to the replica directly. The advanced storage area implements a connectivity detection scheme, caching the results, and using this information when reading or writing to a replica.
If server communication is configured for a site, then server communication is the favored route to content in a different site. If direct connectivity between sites is not available, then server communication must be configured to allow content to be accessed across sites.
Direct connectivity for a file system storage device means that the file system is mounted across the WAN between sites to every Content Platform Engine server. If server communication is not configured, then direct connectivity is required.
Content Platform Engine can transfer content to a cloud object, and without needing to use temporary disk storage.
Content flows directly from a client application as a single stream to the storage device; the content is never written to temporary storage. Only a single instance of Content Platform Engine is involved in the upload.
If a replica contains damaged (missing or incorrect) content, Content Platform Engine can detect the damage and re-replicate the correct content to the replica.
The following table summarizes the differences between advanced storage areas and other storage areas in terms of their support of core features:
| Core feature | Supported by advanced storage areas? | Supported by other types of storage areas? |
|---|---|---|
| File storage | yes | yes |
| Database storage | no | yes |
| OpenStack-based cloud storage | yes | no |
| Fixed content storage | no | yes |
| Replication | yes | no |
| Direct content upload | yes | no |
| Replica repair | yes | no |