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
This chapter provides a summary of key points of the 5800 system usage model that are useful for understanding either API.
In the following sections, the terms from the Java API are used as an aid to exposition. In all cases, a simple equivalent using the C API is available.
Chapter 4, Sun StorageTek 5800 System Query Language provides a detailed description of query capabilties and query syntax.
Chapter 5, Programming Considerations and Best Practices provides programming considerations and best practices that can help you create efficient 5800 system applications.