The Benefits of "Core" Abstraction

Separating the metadata processing engine from the user interface of the products based upon it enables Canto's engineers and third-party development partners to create program enhancements and modifications that can more easily be applied across the entire Canto product line. A closer look at recent upgrades to Cumulus Core help illustrate this point:

Mac Universal Binary Optimization   By updating Cumulus Core to support the new Macintosh Intel architecture, Canto brought maximum performance to all Mac-based Canto customers—no matter which product they use—in a single upgrade. This was of particular advantage to sites running Cumulus Core-based systems on Mac OS X Server. No longer was there a performance penalty for choosing Mac OS X as a server platform.

Database Mirroring   Likewise, a standard feature now on all Cumulus Core-based products is database mirroring, enabling administrators to take advantage of enterprise database systems by turning Cumulus Core ito a high-performance caching engine that feeds metadata to the other system. Customers can use the database they prefer, while still retaining all of the lightening fast metadata search performance that is the cornerstone of all Cumulus Core-based products.

Schedule- and Event-based Actions   In a single global product update, Canto brought advanced automation features to all Cumulus Core-based products.

Canto currently offers three applications based upon Cumulus Core. The Abstraction Layer APIs enable third parties to develop additional applications using the very same APIs used by Canto engineers.

In addition, Cumulus Core runs on many different platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Darwin and Mac OS X. While user interface programming on different platforms is often wildly different, maintaining a layer of abstraction between the user interface and the base technologies found in Cumulus Core ensures system "service" parity across all platforms, even if such an option is not necessary or practical for the UI. This helps make it possible, for example, to administer a Cumulus Core-based system running on Linux from a Windows Client, or to access any available administration features on any support platform from a simple Web browser. Or for customers to maintain Cumulus Core Servers on multiple platforms without having to worry about which users connect to which server—it's all the same from the user perspective.

Cumulus Core makes a wealth of metadata processing services available to the applications it supports. The application developers determine which of Core's features will be used in the product. Read the remaining Cumulus Core webpages for an outline of the capabilities of the various components that make up the Cumulus Core system.