ECS platform

The ECS platform is composed of the data services, portal, storage engine, fabric, infrastructure, and hardware component layers.

Figure 1. ECS component layers

Data services

The data services component layer provides support for access to the ECS object store through object, HDFS, and NFS v3 protocols. In general, ECS provides multiprotocol access, data that is ingested through one protocol can be accessed through another. For example, data that is ingested through S3 can be modified through Swift, NFS v3, or HDFS. This multiprotocol access has some exceptions due to protocol semantics and representations of how the protocol was designed.

NOTE: In this document, HDFS refers to the native Hadoop Compatible File System (HCFS) support, also known as ViPRFS. Hadoop support for ECS object storage (S3A) is typically referenced as S3A.

The following table shows the object APIs and the protocols that are supported and that interoperate.

Table 1. ECS supported data services
Protocols		Support	Interoperability
Object	S3	Capabilities such as byte range updates and rich ACLS	File systems (HDFS and NFS), Swift
	Hadoop S3A	Hadoop 2.7+	S3
	Atmos	Version 2.0	NFS (only path-based objects, not object ID style objects).
	Swift	V2 APIs, Swift, and Keystone v3 authentication	File systems (HDFS and NFS), S3
	CAS	SDK v3.1.544 and later	Not applicable
HDFS (ViPRFS)		Hadoop 2.6.2+	S3, Swift
NFS		NFSv3	S3, Swift, Atmos (only path-based objects)
* When a bucket is enabled for file system access, permissions set using HDFS are in effect when you access the bucket as an NFS file system, and vice versa.

Portal

The ECS Portal component layer provides a Web-based GUI that allows you to manage, license, and provision ECS nodes. The portal has the following comprehensive reporting capabilities:

Capacity utilization for each site, storage pool, node, and disk
Performance monitoring on latency, throughput, transactions per second, and replication progress and rate
Diagnostic information, such as node and disk recovery status and statistics on hardware and process health for each node, which helps identify performance and system bottlenecks

Storage engine

The storage engine component layer provides an unstructured storage engine that is responsible for storing and retrieving data, managing transactions, and protecting and replicating data. The storage engine provides access to objects ingested using multiple object storage protocols and the NFS and HDFS file protocols.

Fabric

The fabric component layer provides cluster health management, software management, configuration management, upgrade capabilities, and alerting. The fabric layer is responsible for keeping the services running and managing resources such as the disks, containers, firewall, and network. It tracks and reacts to environment changes such as failure detection and provides alerts that are related to system health. The 9069 and 9099 ports are public IP ports that are protected by Fabric Firewall manager. Port is not available outside of the cluster.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure component layer uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 as the base operating system for the ECS appliance, or qualified Linux operating systems for commodity hardware configurations. Docker is installed on the infrastructure to deploy the other ECS component layers. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is installed as part of the infrastructure because ECS software is written in Java.

Hardware

The hardware component layer is an ECS appliance or qualified industry standard hardware. For more information about ECS hardware, see the ECS Hardware and Cabling Guide, available from https://www.dell.com/support/.