New Features

• DELETE Behavior Improvements: Swarm 14.1 includes DELETE behavior improvements:

  • The DELETE operation returns the Castor-System-Delete-Marker-Etag header on a named or alias object in the versioning enabled or versioning suspended state. If versioning is disabled, the object is immutable or a context, and no such header is returned. The ETag of the delete marker (returned) is checked by INFO-ing the deleted object and checking the returned ETag header. (SWAR-9292)

  • Updated the DELETE behavior of the current object version that contains a non-deletion lifepoint. The behavior depends on the container's versioning state of an object and refers to the bucket for a named object. For alias tenanted objects, it is a domain's "unnamed" versioning policy. (SWAR-9265)

    • If the container is versioning disabled or versioning suspended, deletion of the current version fails, as before, with a 403.

    • If the container is versioning enabled, the delete succeeds and creates a delete marker, leaving the former current version as the first non-current version.

• New Setting (ec.convertToPolicy): Swarm provides a setting (ec.convertToPolicy) to enable the conversion of existing EC objects to the current policy encoding. (SWAR-9203)

Additional Changes

Changes include versions and fixes coming from testing and user feedback:

OSS Versions

See Third-Party Components for Storage 14.1 for the complete listing of packages and versions for this release.

Fixed in 14.1

• Replication and S3 Backup Feed: The feed is no longer reported as blocked for long-running replications (SWAR-9218). The object replication is allowed for custom metadata containing Non-ASCII characters. (SWAR-9212)

• Bucket and Domain Renaming: Swarm supports renaming of query arguments and bucket and domain using alias UUID. Renaming works with COPY, PUT, and APPEND operations, though COPY with the preserve query argument is advised. If a bucket or domain collision is detected, rename either context without colliding with each other. (SWAR-8708)

• Bulk Configuration: Swarm provides bulk Elasticsearch 7 nodes configuration to consistently use discovery.seed_hosts, not older discovery.zen settings. (SWARM-9395)

• nicTable: It is populated again in SNMP; multiple new columns were added. (SWAR-9327)

• SNMP Certain Communication Stats: Swarm now publishes via SNMP communication stats summarized over a moving window covering the last hour. A new daily stats table in SNMP publishes both communication and network interface stats summarized over a moving window covering the last day. The daily stats are updated every hour. (SWAR-8124)

• Large Physical Memory Support: The EFQ02 errors are not received in logs while running the 14.1 release on nodes with large physical memory (>116G). (SWAR-9353)

• NTP Dependency: NTP dependency checks are improved for configured time servers that either fail to respond quickly or respond using an older NTP version. (SWAR-9373)

• USB Booting: Swarm 14.1.1 now supports booting from a USB drive. This was not working in 14.1.0. (SWAR-9419)

• Replication Failing on Gems Cluster: Remote replication feed cannot replicate some objects in the versioned buckets in Swarm 14.1.2. (SWAR-9428)

Upgrade Impacts

These items are changes to the product function that may require operational or development changes for integrated applications. Address the upgrade impacts for each of the versions since the currently running version:

Watch Items and Known Issues

The following watch items are known:

• A node fails to mount all disks in the node if the node mounts an encrypted volume with a missing encryption key in the configuration. (SWAR-8762)

• The chassis shuts down but does not come back up when restarting a cluster of virtual machines that are UEFI-booted (versus legacy BIOS). (SWAR-8054)

• Lifecycle policy NamePrefix rules (for Non-ASCII characters) do not match the intended objects, hence, the rule does not fire. (SWAR-9413)

• Dates used in lifecycle policy rules do not include a time specifier or time zone specifier. Use YYYY-MM-DD or YYYMMDD formatted dates only. This restriction will be relaxed in later releases. (SWAR-9408)

• Verify the configured “java.io.tmpdir” in “jvm.options” is writable to Elasticsearch for customers using Elasticsearch instances that fail to start with JNA warnings in Elasticsearch logs. Change “java.io.tmpdir” to /var/log/elasticsearch as per desired security preferences. (SWAR-9347)

• Swarm versions 10.0 onward are vulnerable to a kernel issue manifested on some Intel CPUs. Symptoms include lowered performance, long mount times, and cluster instability. Swarm 14.1 provides a work-around for this issue, see Intel Skylake/Cascade Lake CPU Performance Issue). (SWAR-9055)

These are standing operational limitations:

• The Storage UI shows no NFS config if the Elasticsearch cluster is wiped. Contact DataCore Support for help in repopulating the SwarmFS config information. (SWAR-8007)

• Any incomplete multipart upload into a bucket leaves the parts (unnamed streams) in the domain if a bucket is deleted. To find and delete those parts, use the s3cmd utility (search the Support site for "s3cmd" guidance). (SWAR-7690)

• Invalid config parameters that prevent the unassigned nodes from booting are created if subcluster assignments are removed in the CSN UI. (SWAR-7675)

To upgrade Swarm 9 or higher, proceed to How to Upgrade Swarm. For migration from Swarm 8.x or earlier, contact DataCore Support for guidance.