Introduction

Dell EMC ECS provides a complete software-defined cloud storage platform that supports the storage, manipulation, and analysis of unstructured data on a massive scale on commodity hardware. You can deploy ECS as a turnkey storage appliance or as a software product that is installed on a set of qualified commodity servers and disks. ECS offers the cost advantages of a commodity infrastructure and the enterprise reliability, availability, and serviceability of traditional arrays.

ECS uses a scalable architecture that includes multiple nodes and attached storage devices. The nodes and storage devices are commodity components, similar to devices that are generally available, and are housed in one or more racks.

A rack and its components that are supplied by Dell EMC and that have preinstalled software, is referred to as an ECS appliance. A rack and commodity nodes that are not supplied by Dell EMC, is referred to as a Dell EMC ECS software only solution. Multiple racks are referred to as a cluster.

A rack, or multiple joined racks, with processing and storage that is handled as a coherent unit by the ECS infrastructure software is referred to as a site, and at the ECS software level as a Virtual Data Center (VDC).

Management users can access the ECS UI, which is referred to as the ECS Portal, to perform administration tasks. Management users include the System Administrator, Namespace Administrator, and System Monitor roles. Management tasks that can be performed in the ECS Portal can also be performed by using the ECS Management REST API.

ECS administrators can perform the following tasks in the ECS Portal:

• Configure and manage the object store infrastructure (compute and storage resources) for object users.
• Manage users, roles, and buckets within namespaces. Namespaces are equivalent to tenants.

Object users cannot access the ECS Portal, but can access the object store to read and write objects and buckets by using clients that support the following data access protocols:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• EMC Atmos
• OpenStack Swift
• ECS CAS (content-addressable storage)

For more information about object user tasks, see the ECS Data Access Guide, available from the ECS Product Documentation page.

For more information about System Monitor tasks, see the ECS Monitoring Guide, available from the ECS Product Documentation page.