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Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

Powering a Data-Driven Future

Data volumes continue to explode across the enterprise, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices, applications, and the growth of the Internet of Things. As the amount of data businesses generate continues to rise, so does the cost of storing and managing all this information. Traditional storage solutions have become too costly and complex to deploy and manage at the scale organizations require. Public cloud solutions – once heralded as the future of data storage – can introduce unforeseen costs and data latency issues, often making them unpredictable options for long-term storage.

To harness the power of growing volumes of data, Dell ECS provides a next-generation storage solution that can help to reduce costs, simplify management, accelerate access and extract the intelligence from data that organizations need to compete.

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The Challenge of Managing Public 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: Cloud Storage for IT

ECS is a modern 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 up to 76% 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.

Use Cases for ECS

ECS is optimized for a broad range of use cases, including:

Secondary storage.
ECS is an excellent option for secondary or tiered storage, enabling organizations to move infrequently accessed data away from more expensive primary storage.

Modern applications.
Designed for modern application development, management and analytics, ECS supports next-gen web, mobile and cloud applications.

Data Lake.
ECS establishes a data lake foundation for organizations of any size, maximizing the value of user data with powerful HDFS services which enables in-place analytics capabilities that reduce risk, resources and time-to-results.

Storage for Internet of Things.
With no limits on the number of objects, the size of objects or metadata, ECS is the ideal platform to store IoT data.

Global content repository.
ECS enables any organization to consolidate multiple storage systems into a single content repository that is globally accessible.

Geo-protected archive.
ECS can serve as a secure and affordable on-premises cloud for archival and long-term retention purposes.

Video surveillance evidence repository.
ECS makes for a low-cost landing area or secondary storage site for video surveillance data, which has a high capacity footprint per file.

Elasticity in Cloud Computing: Why ECS is the Optimal Choice

The concept of elasticity in cloud computing is crucial for businesses that need to scale their storage needs up or down based on demandECS offers this elasticity, allowing organizations to adapt to market conditions and data requirements swiftly. Unlike traditional storage solutions, ECS provides an elastic infrastructure that can expand or contract without requiring a complete overhaul of your storage architecture.

  • Elasticity explained: ECS's elastic capabilities mean that you can add or remove storage capacity on the fly, without any downtime.
  • Elasticity vs scalability in cloud computing: While scalability refers to the system's ability to handle a growing amount of work, elasticity is about the system's ability to manage these changes efficiently and cost-effectively.

Elastic Cloud Security and Compliance with ECS

One of the significant concerns for organizations considering cloud storage solutions is elastic cloud security. ECS addresses this by offering robust security features that protect your data both in transit and at rest. ECS's security measures are compliant with various industry regulations, making it a secure and reliable elastic cloud solution.

  • Elastic cloud security: ECS offers data-at-rest encryption and encrypted inter-site replication traffic, ensuring that your data is secure at all times.
  • Elastic cloud deployment: With ECS, you can choose between on-premises, hybrid, or full cloud deployments, each with its own set of security protocols.

Dell Support for ECS Deployments

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

Elastic Cloud Storage FAQs

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.

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.

Elasticity in cloud computing refers to the system's ability to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner, enabling the system to gracefully handle workload in real-time.

ECS offers multiple layers of security, including data-at-rest encryption and encrypted inter-site replication traffic. It also provides robust access controls and is compliant with various industry regulations.

ECS offers a flexible pricing model that allows you to pay for only the storage you use, making it a cost-effective elastic cloud solution.

Yes, ECS is designed to work seamlessly with various elastic cloud computing environments, offering flexibility and scalability for your storage needs.

ECS provides an elastic infrastructure that allows you to scale your storage needs up or down based on demand, without requiring a complete overhaul of your existing storage architecture.

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