Every day we hear of a growing number of enterprises joining the ranks of modern, data-driven organizations. These organizations leverage technology and business strategies that set them on a course to unlock even greater value from their data capital. A critical component of this transformation is an organization’s ability to bridge the gap between traditional applications and modern cloud native applications, while empowering initiatives in AI, IoT and more. The core enabler of these endeavors, however, is data. As more and more data is created to fuel these engines of growth, organizations need an economical and efficient way to capture, store, protect and leverage this data within the appropriate business units in a timely manner.
Enter Dell ECS 3.3, the latest version of our enterprise-ready object storage system. This newly updated release contains software enhancements designed to enable our customers to accelerate their data-driven initiatives. ECS empowers customers with a highly flexible solution to capture, store, protect and manage unstructured data with cloud-like capabilities and ease of use. With ECS, customers can retain complete control of their data, reduce security vulnerabilities and meet strict compliance requirements, all at a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) than public cloud services[i].
These latest ECS updates enable our customers to:
- Meet security and compliance mandates with improved enterprise-grade features such as external key management, STIG hardening, and NFS WORM compliance, which can help organizations protect their data capital in an age of heightened threats and more stringent data security requirements.
- Proactively manage the storage infrastructure with enhanced data visibility via capacity monitoring improvements, custom alerts and metric exports. This enables storage administrators to make more accurate forecasts for capacity growth so they can ensure data availability and reap peak system performance.
- Unlock new insights from data faster than ever before through accelerated time-to-insights for developers, enabled via new features such as prefix search for Amazon S3 and faster S3 list execution.
- Modernize the storage infrastructure leveraging the streamlined platform modernization capabilities for legacy object platforms such as EMC Atmos and Centera via seamless retention policy migration and cloud gateway tool unification, to enable organizations to migrate to a modern ECS platform without impacting productivity.
In many customer discussions, we continue to hear how the public cloud is not the end-all-be-all for enterprise workloads. Some of our customers have even repatriated certain workloads that were formerly on public cloud services, opting to support them with ECS to take advantage of the lower costs while gaining better control of their data.
“Dell ECS provides us the ability to deploy our own public cloud storage infrastructure,” says Bob Bender, Chief Technology Officer at Founders’ Federal Credit Union. “Several teams within our organization use ECS as our cloud storage for various purposes like AI, IoT and cloud native apps. While we are able to provide public cloud-like storage, we can ensure compliance and security at a corporate level with the fewest resources to operate the infrastructure.”
In a recent report by ESG Analysts Tony Palmer and Scott Sinclair states that, “…on-premises storage can provide a 59.5% or greater cost advantage over a leading public cloud services provider while reducing data access latency. This analysis was performed using conservative assumptions and considerations, suggesting that more aggressive configurations may yield even greater savings.”
ECS helps solve for these public cloud pain points by offering enterprise-ready capabilities and real economic advantages as data volumes grow.
ECS 3.3 is available to download for all our existing customers today. Learn more about the new updates to ECS – and how they enable enterprises to accelerate infrastructure modernization and data-driven initiatives by visiting the Dell ECS web site. Be sure to also check out the ESG report “Economic Benefit Analysis of On-Premises Object Storage Versus Public Cloud” that shows how ECS offers public cloud-like scalability and flexibility at a better TCO than public cloud services with improved control over enterprise data.
[i] ESG report “Economic Benefit Analysis of On-Premises Object Storage Versus Public Cloud”
