Description

A Smart Transfer is based on a reusable transfer template that saves your transfer settings within Aspera Console. You can configure and share a Smart Transfer for an Azure object storage endpoint with the following instructions.

Instructions

1. Create a new Smart Transfer and set up your source endpoint and folders. If necessary, enter the user and password for the node corresponding to the transfer user and password.

2. For the destination endpoint, select the Azure endpoint you want to transfer to. Enter the Destination Path, which is the Azure URI for your object storage. The Azure URI you should use differs based on whether your storage is SAS (Shared Access Storage) or not.

NOTE: Ensure you are connecting to Azure on SSH port 33001.

Azure URI for non-SAS storage

The Azure URI should look like the following, where storage_account and storage_access_key correspond to the storage account name and access key for your object storage, and /path/to/blob is the path to the blob you want to transfer to:

azu://storage_account:storage_access_key@blob.core.windows.net/path/to/blob

The storage password must be URL encoded. You can use a tool like URL Encoder/Decoder to encode your password.

Azure URI for SAS storage

The Azure URI will be built from your SAS URL, which looks something like the following:

https://aspera.blob.core.windows.net/asperacontainer?st=2016-05-02T17%3A35%3A00Z&se=2017-05-03T17%3A35%3A00Z&sp=rwdl&sv=2015-04-05&sr=c&sig=s8q5J0CaobiW6IrZPvWAqpbfa88lan6031KWuwgMktE%3D

You can either convert your Azure SAS URL manually as described below, or you can use our Azure SAS URL converter which converts the URL for you.

Manual Conversion

Break down the SAS URL into the following components, bolded above:

storage_account: aspera
container: asperacontainer
access_key: st=2016-05-02T17%3A35%3A00Z&se=2017-05-03T17%3A35%3A00Z&sp=rwdl&sv=2015-04-05&sr=c&sig=s8q5J0CaobiW6IrZPvWAqpbfa88lan6031KWuwgMktE%3D

Before proceeding, you MUST Base 64 encode your access key.

You can use a site like this one to perform the encoding. Paste in your access key and Base 64 encode it.Your final access key would look something like the following:

access_key (64 Base encoded): c3QlM0QyMDE2LTA1LTAyVDE3JTI1M0EzNSUyNTNBMDBaJTI2c2UlM0QyMDE3LTA1LTAzVDE3JTI1M0EzNSUyNTNBMDBaJTI2c3AlM0Ryd2RsJTI2c3YlM0QyMDE1LTA0LTA1JTI2c3IlM0RjJTI2c2lnJTNEczhxNUowQ2FvYmlXNklyWlB2V0FxcGJmYTg4bGFuNjAzMUtXdXdnTWt0RSUyNTNE

Finally, construct your Azure URI using the components you broke down previously:

azu://storage_account:access_key@blob.core.windows.net/container

In our example, the final Azure URI would look like the following:

azu://aspera:c3QlM0QyMDE2LTA1LTAyVDE3JTI1M0EzNSUyNTNBMDBaJTI2c2UlM0QyMDE3LTA1LTAzVDE3JTI1M0EzNSUyNTNBMDBaJTI2c3AlM0Ryd2RsJTI2c3YlM0QyMDE1LTA0LTA1JTI2c3IlM0RjJTI2c2lnJTNEczhxNUowQ2FvYmlXNklyWlB2V0FxcGJmYTg4bGFuNjAzMUtXdXdnTWt0RSUyNTNE@blob.core.windows.net/asperacontainer

Sharing the Smart Transfer

To be able to share the Smart Transfer, set up a new unmanaged node for the destination and enter the Azure information.

For Console versions prior to 3.0 you must use an IP address for a saved endpoint, which in this case is the Azure machine on which your object storage is located. One way of finding the IP address is to use nslookup on the DNS in a command line.

Newer versions of Console (3.0. or greater) support DNS names for unmanaged nodes.