Glossary

AES

The Advanced Encryption Standard is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2001.

agnostic

Agnostic, with respect to Replication Policy, means that the replication procedure is independent of rack position and data center. This may also be referred to as rack unaware.

AWS

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, offers a suite of cloud-computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.

DNS

The domain name system is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the internet or a private network.

edge caching

Edge caching refers to the use of caching servers to store content closer to end users.

HA

High availability is the ability of a system to continue to function after the failure of one or more of its servers.

HCI

A hyperconverged infrastructure is a fully software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional hardware-defined systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing (a hypervisor), a virtualized SAN (software-defined storage), and virtualized networking (software-defined networking).

HDD

A hard disk drive is the traditional spinning hard drive, which provides basic nonvolatile storage on a computer.

Hedvig Deployment Server

The Hedvig Deployment Server provides centralized management and monitoring of the storage cluster and storage cluster nodes.

Hedvig Storage Cluster

A Hedvig Storage Cluster is an elastic cluster, formed by using any type of commodity server.

Hedvig Storage Cluster Node

A Hedvig Storage Cluster Node is an individual commodity server running Hedvig Storage Service software.

Hedvig Storage Proxy

A Hedvig Storage Proxy is a lightweight software component that deploys at the application tier as a virtual machine or Docker container, or on bare metal, to provide storage access to any physical host or virtual machine in the application tier. The storage proxy presents block, file, and object (Amazon S3) storage access to app hosts, accelerates read performance with flash caching, drives efficiency with deduplication, and secures data with encryption. This may also be referred to as an HSP, controller, CVM, target, or tgt.

IAM

AWS identity and access management is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources.

IGW

An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between instances in a VPC and the internet.

JBOD

JBOD (abbreviated from just a bunch of disks) is an architecture using multiple hard drives, but not in a RAID configuration, thus providing neither redundancy nor performance improvements.

jumbo frame

A jumbo frame is an Ethernet frame with a payload greater than the standard maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 1,500 bytes.

KVM

A kernel-based virtual machine is a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor.

LVM

Logical volume management provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes.

NAT

A network address translation gateway enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services, but prevents the internet from initiating a connection with those instances.

NTP

Network time protocol is a networking protocol for clock synchronization between computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks.

NVMe

Non-volatile memory express is a logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) bus.

OVF

Open virtualization format is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or, more generally, software to be run in VMs.

PCIe

Peripheral component interconnect express is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard.

PEM

Privacy enhanced mail is a Base64 encoded DER (distinguished encoding rules) certificate. PEM certificates are frequently used for web servers as they can easily be translated into readable data using a simple text editor.

qcow, qcow2

QEMU Copy On Write is a file format for disk image files used by QEMU (Quick EMUlator), a free and open-source emulator that performs hardware virtualization.

RAID

Redundant array of independent disks is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into a single logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.

SAS

Serial attached SCSI (small computer system interface) is a point-to-point serial protocol that moves data to and from computer storage devices such as hard drives and tape drives.

SATA

Serial advanced technology attachment is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives.

SSD

A solid-state drive (or flash or pin-to-flash) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently.

vCPU

A virtual CPU also known as a virtual processor, is a physical central processing unit (CPU) that is assigned to a virtual machine (VM).

VHD, VHDX

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 introduced a new version of the virtual hard disk (VHD) format called VHDX, which has a much larger storage capacity than the older VHD format.

VIP address

A VIP (virtual internet protocol) address maps one external IP address and one external port to a multiple number of possible IP addresses and ports.

Hedvig Storage Proxies are configured with two Ethernet interfaces and run as an HA pair. For failover to work correctly, a public VIP address and a private VIP address are required for the Ethernet interfaces.

VMDK

Virtual machine disk is a file format that describes containers for virtual HDDs to be used in VMs.

VNIC

A virtual network interface controller is a virtualized NIC used by a VM as its network interface. Each VNIC is assigned a unique MAC address and is assigned to a single VM.

VPC

The Amazon virtual private cloud lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.