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Data Center Primary Storage

Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

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Solution Overview
The ECS lab is currently made up of three sites which are called "VDC"'s or Virtual Data Centers. 

ECS is deployed in totally self contained integrated rack (appliance model) with all the components needed such as top of rack switches, management, compute and storage. ECS is deployed in a predefined form factor with the ability to scale both up and out. There are only one type of node within the system with all nodes having the ability and/or actively participating in the; management, front-end customer interface, and back-end data storage.

Differentiation includes:
  • Multi-Site capacity and network optimization at scale using XOR.
  • How consistency is handled within the system ("Strong Consistency" always enforced).
  • Ease of initial set-up and management.
  • Native meta-data search capability.
  • Bi-modal between S3 API, HDFS, NFS and SMB.

Goals & Objectives

ECS is Dell/EMC's third generation of an Object Storage solution. 

Object (Cloud) Storage is quickly becoming the next generation of NAS with important differences such as:
  • Being more cost effective.
  • Ability to share content in a global namespace.
  • Ability to have customer Meta Data Tags.
  • Much higher resiliency and durability than traditional POSIX deployed NAS. 
  • Much easier to scale and manage than "traditional" NAS.
  • Easier to deploy and consume, with users accessing via a key/name pair and the S3 API interface.


Hardware & Software

Created with two U400 ECS rack systems and a total of eight storage nodes. This lab contains model "2" hardware and we will soon be upgrading and deploying with model "3" hardware. That said the storage OS is at the latest levels and provides the same look and feel between hardware versions.

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