Introduction

IBM Aspera Shares provides a simple and intuitive way for companies to share files and directories of any size within their organization, or with external customers and partners. The powerful and flexible security model is administered through a single management point combining authorization, user management, and access control.

An easy-to-use web-based application that can be accessed from most standard web browsers, Aspera Shares provides secure access to a consolidated view of all available content. With the underlying Aspera fasp™ transport at its core, Aspera Shares delivers unmatched performance and includes all the exceptional transfer and management capabilities of the highly regarded HST Server.

Shares can be deployed in a high availability (HA) environment. This document presents the Shares HA Active/Active solution that leverages the Aspera Cluster Manager (ACM) software.

Intended Audience of This Document

This document requires that:
  • You have background as a network engineer.
  • You are knowledgeable about HA environments.
  • You are familiar with the requirements of your use case.
  • You are familiar with the Shares and High Speed Transfer Server products.
  • You have expertise and experience configuring third-party systems, such as shared storage and load balancers.

How to Use This Document

This document is intended to be used as a basic guideline to inform and facilitate the customer's ability to craft a HA solution to match the requirements of the customer's particular use case. Each use case differs in requirements, including:
  • Approved technology and software vendors
  • Hardware sizing requirements
  • Security requirements
  • Type of shared storage
  • Estimated traffic load and required bandwidth
  • Budget to cover costs
Procedures for setting up third-party systems such as shared storage and load balancers are outside the scope of this document.
Note: Due to the complexity of any high-availability setup due to differing requirements for each customer, Aspera recommends customer engage with IBM professional services to do an HA install or upgrade of IBM Aspera products. This document primarily serves as a reference detailing basic considerations and requirements to operate IBM Shares in an HA configuration. You can engage professional services by contacting your sales representative.

Covered Use Case

The use case described in this guide is a dual, Shares instance cluster, where the traffic is balanced between two active nodes, providing a high-availability service with seamless automatic fail-over in the event that one node fails or becomes unavailable.

It is possible to have more than two nodes in an HA environment, but that configuration is outside the scope of this document.

It is also possible to separate the web application from the transfer server portion in order to run these services on different hosts. You can find instructions on separating these processes in the IBM Aspera Shares Admin Guide, but neither this document nor those instructions cover that procedure for HA environments.

Note: This HA solution supports Linux platforms only.