What is EMC ECS storage system?

EMC ECS (Elastic cloud storage) provides complete cloud-based storage solution for enterprise, which is highly available, easily scalable, inexpensive and compatible with other storage solutions and hardware. EMS ECS is software defined platform which runs on commodity infrastructure. ECS can be deployed as software only product or complete out of the box software-hardware package for enterprise, based on need and demand. Apart from hardware it also supports popular object-based storage platform APIs including Amazon S3, Atmos, Swift, CAS etc. Combining all these with globally distributed storage infrastructure, EMC ECS allows administrators to manage globally distributed infrastructure, providing users with all data on a single platform accessible with simple http/https requests.

EMC ECS is designed for storage and movement of very high volumes of data and can handle workloads up to 5 petabytes with speed up to 10GBPS.

Dell EMC ECS supports object-based storage as well as file systems like HDFS and NFS.

Figure 1 : ECS architecture layers

The overview of each layer in the Dell EMC ECS architecture is as follows:

  • Infrastructure – Linux Operating System

  • Fabric – Base services which run on each node and provide cluster configuration.

  • Storage Engine – Storage engine is a set of services which run on each node and are responsible for providing storage services to clients. Storage Engine looks after data storage, indexing, location of each object, etc. It is responsible for getting client requests and retrieving and supplying data back.

  • Provisioning – Self service portal from where administrators can create ECS configurations defining VDC, storage pools, replication groups etc.