Prerequisites for AWS deployment

The information in this article pertains only to installing the Storage Connector in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. If installing the Storage Connector within your on-premise environment, see the on-premise Prerequisites article. Also, please read About Syncplicity StorageVaults before reading this article.

To configure on-premise StorageVault(s), you need at least two on-premise Storage Connectors. You can also deploy more for scalability and high availability purposes.

Before installing on-premise Storage Connector, make sure you meet the following prerequisites:

• Hardware Requirements
• Network Configuration

Hardware requirements

The Storage Connector must meet the following requirements:

• A minimum of two virtual machines (instances) hosted on Amazon EC2, where each instance is minimally of type c1.xlarge.
• An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in front of all instances, configured for SSL offloading with a CA-signed SSL certificate.

NOTE: Some AWS regions do not support Signature Version 2 regardless of the AWS service being used. The current version of Syncplicity Storage Connector cannot be deployed in these regions as it requires Signature Version 2. For a list of AWS regions that do not support Signature Version 2, refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signature-version-2.html.

Network configuration

The Storage Connector is initially supplied as an RPM file and installed on a virtual machine. Upgrades are also provided as RPM files. Please contact our Customer Support team or your personal CSM to get the latest version of the RPM file.

The Storage Connector supports the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment with the following requirements:

• In the AWS VPC network, an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) should be configured for load balancing and SSL offloading.
• The Storage Connector instances should be inside the private subnet.
• Since the private subnet cannot access S3 (and the Internet), a NAT instance should be created to get outbound traffic from the Storage Connectors and enable connections to S3. It is recommended to have a failover NAT instance.
• Proper security groups must be created to allowing access to the ELB and to the Storage Connectors

The following diagram shows a typical example.

Each Syncplicity client or app that is to connect to the Storage Connector needs to meet the minimum client version as listed here.

The Storage Connector requires specific inbound and outbound ports to be open, as specified in the following tables.

Inbound port requirements

In order for the Syncplicity clients to connect to the Storage Connector application from the Internet, the following inbound ports must be open.

Outbound Port Requirements

In general, traffic outbound to external hosts on port 443 should be allowed. If for some reason this is not so, at least the following should be allowed.