Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance is an Dell EMC ViPR implementation using commodity servers and storage devices with Dell EMC software as a storage system. Primarily offered as object or HDFS storage, the ECS appliance also can provide block storage access with Dell EMC ScaleIO installed. The system can scale with multiple nodes. Pre-configured models are available with either 4 or 8 nodes but ECS Appliance should be able to scale much larger with custom deployments. A node is a standard server. Storage is in an attached enclosure with 60 – 6 TB SATA drives in a JBOD arrangement.
Deployment of the ECS Appliance 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. 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, Amazon S3, and Swift APIs supported for object access. HDFS is also supported for use in big data analytics environments. Block storage support can be added with the inclusion of Dell EMC ScaleIO. An Atmos node can also be configured to operate as a gateway for CIFS/SMB and NFS for file access.
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.