A Swiss army knife is a multi-layered tool equipped with a variety of attachments that can serve up many different functions. When first introduced in the late 1880s, it revolutionized the way soldiers performed their daily tasks – anything from disassembling service rifles to opening up canned rations in the field. Fast forward to 2016, the use of the Swiss army knife may have changed quite a bit but the initial concept of consolidating various components into a single multi-purpose tool has certainly influenced organizations and industries across the world.
EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is without question the Swiss army knife for cloud solutions. ECS revolutionizes storage management by consolidating varied workloads for object, file, and HDFS into a single, unified system. You can manage both traditional and ‘next-gen’ or ‘cloud-native’ applications on a platform that spans geographies and acts as a single logical resource. Just like a Swiss army knife, ECS can maximize capacity by packing a lot into a tiny space. ECS Appliance can squeeze in sixty 8TB drives into a standard 4U DAE with up to 4PB of storage in single rack, for a highly dense platform with a very economical data center footprint.
EMC provides a suite of cloud-enabling ‘tools and attachments’ to the ECS platform that deliver specialized functionality for cloud tiering, long-term retention, and archiving use cases. Here’s a quick review of these solutions:
- CloudPools – extends the data lake to the cloud with transparent tiering of cold/inactive data from EMC Isilon clusters to ECS low cost cloud storage
- CloudBoost – move EMC Data Protection Suite (Avamar & Networker) archives to the cloud for long-term retention purposes
- CloudArray – cloud integrated storage tier that extends cost-effective cloud capacity to high-performance storage arrays
- DD Cloud Tier – enables simple cloud tiering of deduped data from EMC Data Domain to ECS for long-term retention
All of these solutions seamlessly integrate with existing EMC products/investments with the same objective of leveraging cloud storage to lower cost and free up high performance Tier 1 resources. These solutions also have the option of targeting public cloud vendors like Virtustream or other storage providers for added choice and flexibility. Whether you’re an enterprise or cloud service provider with a private, public, or hybrid strategy – or – whether you have a Capex or Opex priority, EMC has a flexible cloud solution that can manage your workloads and applications for today and for tomorrow.
Want more on ECS? Download the latest fully containerized version of ECS for FREE for non-production use by visiting www.emc.com/getecs.