Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is object storage offered as software or using commodity servers and storage devices as a complete system. The system can scale with multiple nodes and is offered as a complete rack solution or individual nodes. A node uses a Dell PowerEdge server. Storage is in an attached enclosure with several options including high-density nodes. The newest models are the EX300 with a capacity of up to 1.54 PB per rack, the EX500 mid-range model capable of 4.6 PB per rack, and the EX3000 high density model with up to 8.6 PB in a single rack.
Software included with ECS includes storage resource management functionality with capacity management and reporting, capacity reclamation and rebalancing reporting, and threshold alerting.
Deployment of ECS can be across multiple sites in an active-active configuration, allowing for geo-distribution of data and forward error correction using erasure codes for data protection. Causal consistency is supported for access integrity of the distributed system.
Dell EMC ECS Appliance is a distributed scale out object storage system that is delivered as a complete system with several pre-defined configurations. ECS software creates a global namespace for objects with custom metadata determining placement, protection, and retention. HTTP/REST with custom Atmos APIs, Centera APIs, Amazon S3, and Swift APIs are supported for object access. ECS supports NFS v3 for file access and HDFS is also supported for use in big data analytics environments.
Data is stored as blocks called chunks on the attached storage giving ECS a true object storage implementation with object access through APIs. The Dell EMC ECS Appliance system uses Linux as an underlying OS on the controller nodes.