Elastic Cloud Storage

In recent years, public cloud services seemed like the inevitable answer to the challenges of managing rapidly expanding data volumes. IT teams jumped at the chance to offload the daily burden of managing storage infrastructure to a cloud service provider. CIOs were enamored of the low-cost entry point and the CapEx savings that cloud storage services offered. And the pay-as-you-go cost model and vast scalability of public cloud storage seemed to solve so many problems.

However, many organizations that initially embraced public cloud benefits soon began to see some drawbacks as well. Data mobility was an issue – the speed with which data could move to and from the cloud was limited, and there were unexpected charges per transaction in addition to the cost of network bandwidth. There were data residency issues for some organizations, leading to compliance and regulatory problems. And the needs of bandwidth-intensive data analytics workloads – critical to extracting insight and intelligence from business data – led to an increase in WAN activity and bandwidth costs associated with the analysis of cloud-based content.

With these limitations in mind, more organizations have begun to reconsider the option of hosting their own on-premises storage solution to reduce cost and data access latency.

ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) is a modern software-defined object storage platform designed for both traditional and next-generation workloads that provides organizations with an on-premise alternative to public cloud solutions. Delivering remarkable scalability, flexibility and resiliency, ECS empowers organizations to capture, store, protect and manage unstructured data at a scale that matches the public cloud, all behind the enterprise firewall.

ECS features a flat, scale-out architecture and strong global consistency, enablingorganizations to lower total cost of ownership by nearly 60% over public cloud deployments. ECS makes it easy to manage globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single global namespace, providing users with anywhere access to critical business data. With ECS, any organization can achieve cloud-scale economics within their own data center.

Benefits of ECS include:

• Cloud scalability. A flexible, software-defined architecture promotes limitless scalability that supports both traditional and next-generation workloads.
• Flexible deployment. ECS can be deployed as an appliance or as a software-defined storage solution.
• Reduced TCO. ECS can dramatically lower total cost of ownership when compared to public cloud storage and traditional storage deployments. Low management overhead, smaller data center footprint and high storage utilization all help to reduce storage costs.
• Enterprise-grade technology. ECS offers data-at-rest encryption and encrypted inter-site replication traffic; reporting, policy-based and event-based record retention and platform hardening for SEC Rule 17a-4(f); authentication, authorization and access controls with Active Directory and LDAP; integration with monitoring and alerting infrastructure; and other enhanced enterprise capabilities such as multi-tenancy, capacity monitoring, alerting and multi-part uploads.
  

For organizations choosing Dell ECS, the ProSupport Enterprise Suite provides access to highly trained experts around the clock and around the globe to address IT needs, reduce disruptions and ensure high productivity levels. Key benefits of this support service include:

• A central point of accountability for all hardware and software issues
• Predictive, automated tools and innovative technology.
• Cross-domain experience that goes beyond a single piece of hardware
• Flexibility to choose levels of support based on the complexity of your environment and the mission-critical quality of specific systems
  

What is ECS?
ECS is an enterprise-grade object storage platform that allows organizations to flexibly capture, store, protect and manage unstructured data behind the enterprise firewall, with scalability that rivals the public cloud.

What is object storage?
Object storage is an architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to file storage which manages data as files in a hierarchical directory structure. An object contains data, meta-data and a unique global identifier that enables the object to be retrieved. Object storage is preferred for cloud applications because of its ability to scale easily, its accessibility via common APIs, and its ability to use a single namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware.