New Frontiers in Cloud Object Storage with EMC Elastic Cloud Storage

EMC has been a leader in object storage since the beginning, with the EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Appliance helping bridge the gap between hardware and software for a software-defined approach. Today we announce upgrades to the software that powers ECS Appliance, with EMC ECS Software 1.2.  ECS Appliance provides a turnkey cloud storage infrastructure that provides enterprise availability with the cost advantages of commodity storage—and today’s updates are a direct response to the needs of customers building large object stores.

ECS Appliance brings enterprise-class features to the cloud storage infrastructure, and these updates are designed to further improve the key facets of the software.

ECS Pulse Image

Here’s what’s new in ECS 1.2:

  • Improved User Experience:The earlier version of ECS required ViPR controller for management and a virtual machine for use as an installer. ECS v1.2 improves the user experience by eliminating both these requirements. ECS v1.2 has its own integrated management and will use ECS node as an installer.
  • Increased Availability:With the temporary site failover improvement, ECS v1.2 implements failover and failback automation in the event of a site failure, helping to ensure applications have access to the data even if the primary site is down.  In addition, rack-level awareness has been implemented to improve availability via redundancy.
  • Improved Performance:ECS v1.2 delivers performance improvements in multi-site environments with geo-replication and geo-caching. Data is now cached at ECS secondary sites, which reduces latency.
  • New Multi-tenant Reporting and Metering for Service Providers: Comprehensive multi-tenant features including tenant-level and bucket-level metering. Key metrics and reporting are now provided including capacity, object count, objects created, objects deleted and inbound/outbound bandwidth. A quota feature also enables administrators to set soft quotas for buckets and tenants.  Buckets can be locked once a quota is reached. In addition, administrators can view activities pertaining to the creation, update, and deletion of buckets and changes to ownership.  These events are visible via the ECS GUI and through REST API.

ECS Appliance is a solution which targets companies who need a turnkey cloud storage infrastructure.  With ECS Software v1.2, EMC has further simplified deploying and managing ECS Appliance.

Sam Grocott

About the Author: Sam Grocott

Sam Grocott is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. He leads the marketing activities for all infrastructure and client solutions and the services portfolio, including critical GTM activities across the portfolio, such as AI, APEX & Multicloud, Edge, Telecom, portfolio marketing and competitive intelligence. Sam began his career at Isilon Systems in 2001, where he led product management and helped launch Isilon's first products in 2003. After EMC acquired Isilon in 2010, Sam headed the marketing and product management team that delivered the market-leading scale-out NAS offering. When Dell acquired EMC in 2016, Sam's role expanded to cover the Dell Infrastructure Solutions portfolio for Marketing. The organization evolved to represent the entire Dell Technologies portfolio a few years later.