Direct access to oCIS server on LANs for scalable high-speed access

Infinite Scale
1

We have multiple oCIS 6.x.x servers with S3 as their backend being used both for cloud storage across the Internet as well as NAS-like servers on LANs.

Performance on the LANs has been mostly acceptable when it’s just a few workstations, but as we scale to larger workgroups and render farms with 100s of nodes, pulling everything on-demand from S3 becomes a huge bottleneck.

Our near-term solution to this has been to set up a local cache of sorts via an SMB server (running on Ubuntu 24) on the LAN which synchronizes everything to/from oCIS via ownCloud Desktop. This works well enough to function, but has the following issues:

  • Every single file has to be synchronized because ownCloud Desktop on Linux doesn’t support VFS. This becomes a huge bottleneck when there are large files, directory structures with hundreds of thousands of files, etc.
  • We need to keep enough disk space available for the “cache” to hold the entire oCIS server, which can be hundreds of terabytes of data despite maybe only 10TB being in active use.
  • Files which take time to write to the cache try and upload to oCIS in partial form, so they have to upload again and again as changes are detected by ownCloud Desktop rather than waiting until the files are 100% complete.

Ideally we’d love:

  1. A way to mount oCIS directly as SMB or similar without having to go through ownCloud Desktop
  2. A way to rsync, scp or sftp files directly to/from the oCIS server

How are people handling this sort of thing in your deployments? Particularly for enterprise I can’t imagine everyone is just relying on VFS in Windows through ownCloud Desktop for all file access.

2

Anyone? Hoping there’s some insight out there for this kind of requirement.

3

Hey,

i think this sounds to me more that it would require consulting from the ownCloud people via some kind of enterprise contract rather then community support of volunteers.

1 Like
4

That’s a tough scaling challenge! For direct access, have you considered using NFS instead of SMB for mounting oCIS? It might handle large files and directories more efficiently. Also, looking into a more optimized caching solution or using rsync could help reduce the overhead with large data sets. Would be curious to hear how it works once you implement that!

5

Thanks, Mark. Will definitely look into NFS as an alternative to SMB. The more challenging issue is how the files on the share are served from oCIS. Using ownCloud Desktop on Linux is far from ideal as it doesn’t handle large files well and requires everything be cached locally. What we need is a more dynamic system that can access files on demand.

6

Did you check WebDAV with OpenID Connect | ownCloud ?

In theory, any webdav client should work with oCIS. The main problem though, is that oCIS wants oAuth2 authentication, and there are barely clients implementing it.

It’s possible to enable basic authentication in oCIS, but it isn’t recommended and is kept mostly for testing purposes.