Dell EMC ECS EXF900
The new all-flash ECS appliance, the EXF900, delivers extreme performance at scale
Overview:
Dell EMC ECS is a software-defined, cloud-scale, object storage platform. With ECS, any organization can deliver scalable public cloud services with the reliability and control of a private-cloud infrastructure. ECS provides comprehensive protocol support for unstructured-object and file-workloads on a single modern storage platform. Using ECS, organizations can easily manage globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single global namespace with anywhere access to content. ECS features a flexible software-defined architecture that is layered to promote limitless scalability. Each layer is completely abstracted and independently scalable with high availability and no single points of failure. ECS also comes in a fullyintegrated turnkey appliance that bundles software and Dell PowerEdge servers into an easily deployed object system.
ECS is currently in its third generation of hardware appliances, the EX-Series, building on the legacy of Dell EMC’s Centera and Atmos object storage platforms which predated ECS. The ECS EX-Series is comprised of four unique hardware products: the EX300, EX500, EX3000 and the all-flash EXF900.
- ECS EX300: As a starter edition, the EX300 lowers object storage adoption entry barriers with 60TB starting cluster options. With the capacity to grow to exabyte-scale, this is the ideal sandbox for in-house, cloudnative, mobile and web application storage. It’s also the optimal system to modernize existing Centera or Atmos deployments.
- ECS EX500: The perfect blend of economy and density, the EX500 injects even greater flexibility into the ECS appliance portfolio. With rack capacity ranging from 480TB to 6.1PB, the EX500 is a versatile option for midsized enterprises looking to support either modern application or deep archive use cases.
- ECS EX3000: A high density, hot diskswappable, object storage system, the EX3000 packs up to 11.5PB per rack and can grow into exabyte-scale with ease. It’s an ideal platform for longterm retention, storage consolidation and multipurpose object storage requirements that span S3, HDFS and archive workloads.
- ECS EXF900: Built with NVMe-based SSDs on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, the EXF900 appliance delivers extreme performance at scale for modern workloads such as AI, machine learning, IoT and real-time analytics applications. Capacity begins at 230TB and scales up to 2.94PB per rack.
Unstructured data is at the heart of a digital future
Digital and IT modernization are revolutionizing the way organizations across the globe conduct business. From fueling Internet of Things initiatives, to delivering more immersive customer experiences, enterprises are gearing up to embrace a new digital reality. According to IDC, “Within the next four years, the global economy will finally reach ‘digital supremacy,’ with more than half of GDP driven by products and services from digitally transformed enterprises.
While this digital future promises to unlock new value for organizations, much of the value is hidden within unstructured data-images, videos, social media data, internet traffic, etc. Organizations require a cost-effective means to store, analyze and serve unstructured data to enterprise applications. Due to its massive scalability, simplified architecture and easyto-use APIs, many are turning to object storage systems to help them achieve their goals.
Organizations need more than the public cloud alone
In the early days of the cloud hype-cycle, countless organizations turned to public clouds, believing them to be the remedy for all their unstructured data storage needs. However, when it comes to data management and storage, making use of cloud object storage platforms such as Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure Blobs involves navigating fundamental tradeoffs in the areas of data residency, compliance with regulatory standards, as well as unforeseen costs that are often detailed in fine print.
While public clouds inarguably have a central role to play in an organization’s overall IT strategy, they are not without their limitations. In fact, approximately 83% of organizations have reported cloud repatriation activities, 64% have a higher total cost of service(s) than anticipated,and 34% have repatriated workloads due to data security issues.This is why establishing sound multi-cloud and private cloud strategies is critical to the future success of organizations across every industry.
Introducing Dell EMC ECS: Enterprise object storage
Dell EMC ECS, an enterprise-grade object storage platform, empowers your organization to flexibly capture, store, protect and manage unstructured data at public cloud-like scale, all within the confines of your organization’s data center.
Deployable as a software-only model or a turnkey appliance, ECS boasts unmatched scalability, performance, resilience, and economics to meet the demands of modern business. As an S3-compatible, globally scalable object store, ECS delivers the capabilities of the public cloud with the command and control of a private cloud infrastructure. Use ECS to develop cloud-native applications, build exabyte-scale archives, fuel strategic analytics initiatives and meet strict regulatory standards, all at a lower total-cost-to-own.
Cost-effective at scale
Build an object storage cloud with up to 59.5% lower TCO
Fast S3 for modern apps
Support modern workloads with high performance, S3- compatible storage
Enterprise proven
Deploy with confidence using best-in-class technology and services
Features:
Cost-effective at scale
Limitless scale: Built with a scale-out, geo-distributed architecture, ECS makes it easy to keep pace with exponential data growth, wherever your data center resides. Simply add new nodes and support workloads at public cloud-scale with the reliability and control of a private cloud infrastructure.
Lower TCO: The enterprise scale, performance, and versatility of ECS delivers greater cost savings-59.5% lower total-cost-of-ownership-than the leading public cloud provider. 4 With ECS, your organization can eliminate many public cloud challenges including data migration costs, latency, unpredictability of data access patterns, cloud vendor lock-in, security and compliance issues to name a few.
Global accessibility: Using the multi-site federation capabilities of ECS, organizations can create globally accessible content repositories. By deploying storage near the applications and users it supports, you can minimize latency and speed time-to-value. Combined with unique replication capabilities, the same data can be accessed by clients in geographically distributed locales without incurring significant storage overhead.
Secondary storage: A cost-effective secondary storage tier, ECS frees up expensive primary storage for business-critical apps while keeping long-term data stores readily accessible versus traditional tape archives. ECS is the ideal target for policy-based tiering solutions from Dell EMC such as ECS GeoDrive, PowerScale CloudPools, Power Protect DD CloudTier and numerous third-party gateways.
Simplified management: A single administrator can manage billons of objects, hundreds of tenants and petabytes of data with low overhead using a centralized, intuitive GUI and built-in reporting. ECS also features numerous REST-based management APIs, allowing your organization to seamlessly plug into existing management and directory solutions.
Fast S3 for modern apps
All-flash S3: Combining the simplicity of S3 with the lighting-fast performance of the EXF900 all-flash, NVMebased SSD appliance, ECS is the ideal data store for read-intensive applications such as Spark, TensorFlow, Presto and more. Using ECS to fuel GPU servers with throughput-optimized storage rapidly exposes training algorithms and applications to more data than ever before.
Modern data lake: With rich multiprotocol support and interoperability-S3, S3a, NFS, etc.-your organization can establish massively scalable, multi-purpose data lakes to fuel modern app and analytics initiatives. Data ingested through one protocol can be accessed by others, eliminating the need to rearchitect existing applications and speeding time-to-value.
Splunk analytics: ECS features the perfect blend of efficiency, durability, performance and scale to support Splunk SmartStore analytics workloads. Whether you require high performance storage to analyze machine data or efficient, economical cold storage, ECS helps your organization deliver operational intelligence, faster.
Streaming Data Platform storage: ECS is an ideal persistent data store for streaming data engines such as Dell EMC’s Streaming Data Platform. With the availability of performance and capacity-optimized storage appliances, ECS can support data streams at scale, without becoming a workflow bottleneck.
Enterprise proven
Built-in data protection: With native protection capabilities-D@RE, erasure coding, strong consistency, fault tolerance, triple mirroring and more-ECS ensures data is always secure and recoverable across all data center geographies. IAM support with object tagging protects data from unauthorised access.
Helps meet compliance standards: Using advanced retention, indexing, replication and logging features, ECS can help your organization meet both internal and external compliance requirements including GDPR, SEC, CFTC, and STIG regulations. WORM capabilities ensure sensitive data is protected from tampering.
Streamlined upgrades: ECS provides a non-disruptive upgrade experience, ensuring continuity of operations, even as the underlying storage hardware evolves over time. As legacy appliances are replaced, ECS protects your investments with data-in-place upgrades delivered by Professional Services experts from Dell Technologies.
Legacy of leadership: Dell Technologies has a proven track record of leadership in the unstructured data storage industry with thousands of customers. In fact, Dell EMC is recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s distributed file systems and object storage Magic Quadrant for the 5th year running.
Technical Specifications:
| EX300 | EX500 | EX3000S / EX3000D | EXF900 | |
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| 40U rack configurations |
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| Multiple storage configurations | Unstructured storage up to 3072TB per rack | Unstructured storage up to 6144TB per rack | Unstructured storage up to 11,520TB per rack | Unstructured storage up to 2949TB per rack |
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| Node:disk ratios | 1:12 | 1:12, 1:24 |
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1:12, 1:24 |
| Disk type (7200rpm, SATA) | 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB | 8TB, 12TB, 16TB | 12TB, 16TB | 3.84TB & 7.68TB (RI NVMe U.2 SSD) |
| Optional cache SSD | Optional SSD (960GB) drive for improved metadata read/write cache performance | N/A | ||
| Raw capacity (per node) | 12TB, 24TB, 48TB, 96TB, 192TB | 96TB, 144TB, 192TB / 192TB, 288TB, 384TB | 540TB, 720TB, 720TB, 960TB, 1080TB, 1440TB / 360TB, 480TB, 540TB, 720TB | 46TB / 92TB, 92TB / 184 |
| Max raw capacity (per rack) | 192TB, 384TB, 768TB, 1536TB, 3072TB | 3072TB, 4608TB, 6144TB | 8640TB, 11,520TB | 2949TB |
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| Max power | 0.29 kVA per 2U node | .72 kVA per 2U node | 1.35 kVA per 4U chassis | 1.086 kVA per 2U node |
| Max heatload | 800 Btu/Hr for every 2U node | 2400 Btu/Hr for every 2U node | 4500 Btu/Hr for every 4U chassis | 3706 BTU/Hr for every 2U node |
| Power specifications (server) | 2X750W power supplies per node (HA) | 2X1100W power supplies per node (HA) |
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2X1100W power supplies per node (HA) |
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| Backend aggregation switches | N/A | N/A | N/A | Yes |
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Compare:
| ECS EX300 | ECS EX500 | ECS EX3000 | ECS EXF900 | |
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| Description | Flexible object storage platform that lowers the starting costs of a cluster and can scale up to exabytes as needed | Versatile option for midsized enterprises with rack capacity ranging from 480TB to 6.1PB | Ultra-dense object storage platform that packs up to 11.5PB per rack and can grow to exabyte scale | All-flash object storage appliance built with SFF NVMe SSDs for extreme performance |
| Use Cases | Ideal for modernizing Centera or Atmos environments and storing data generated by modern applications | Ideal for supporting modern application, deep archive, or multi-purpose use cases | Optimized for cloud-native workloads and organizations with large, long-term archival requirements | Optimized for cloud-native, AI, machine learning, IoT and real-time analytics applications |
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| Upgrade Options |
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15 drive capacity upgrade kit |
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Solutions & Services:
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Pricing Notes:
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- Pricing and product availability subject to change without notice.