Dell EMC Introducing ECS 3.6 Software and EXF900 AFA

By Tony Yakovic, product marketing manager, ECS, Dell Technologies, Inc.

The traditional view of block as fast, file as ubiquitous and object as slow, cheap and deep is changing as the massive growth of unstructured data raises the potential of performance storage for object-based applications.

EXF900 appliance

Organizations are realizing the advantages object offers-scalability, flexibility, API-driven cloud-native architectures-when combined with high performance all-flash media, can support their most data-hungry workloads. The object storage market is primed for a revolution.

Introducing ECS 3.6 and EXF900
Built with NVMe-based SSDs on PowerEdge servers, the EXF900 appliance delivers performance at scale for workloads such as AI, ML, IoT, analytics and cloud-native applications. It also embraces the NVM-oF protocol for its backend network, accelerating node-to-node communication and unlocking the true potential of the all-flash system’s throughput rate, especially in large scale deployments. According to recent benchmarking tests, we’re seeing 21x performance improvements ^(*) and 19x higher transactions per second (TPS) ^(**) when compared to our capacity optimized EX300 appliances.

We believe the EXF900 is going to drive new opportunities and greater business agility for customers.

Michael Holm, director, product development, Fortlax AB (Cloudist Solutions), feels the same: “The new, all-flash EXF900 appliance from Dell EMC is going to unlock new use cases for our organization. With NVMe drives we can deliver even more performance from our ECS clusters to support our customers’ analytics initiatives. We are looking forward to this high-performance appliance and believe it will have a significant impact on our business.”

Beyond supercharged appliance, we have also added capabilities to the ECS software including:

• Object cloning: This feature enables high-speed object cloning and fan-out writes by implementing a fan-out API spec. Essentially, ECS enables a single request to write or copy thousands of private copies on the backend, reducing client-side processing, server-side processing and network load. This capability is for M&E workloads such as Cloud DVR.

• Security admin role: We’ve also introduced a way for organizations to grant specific usage rights and privileges to security administrators to better protect data. This feature integrates with existing Active Directory/LDAP permissions, making for easy adoption and implementation.

• Security API: ECS version 3.6 also surfaces a new API to automate the reporting of system security settings. It makes it simple to integrate ECS with existing monitoring and data protection solutions for improved security across the board.

In case you missed it, we recently announced our latest venture in the software-defined object storage space with ObjectScale – currently in early access. It is a scale-out object storage software to take advantage of Kubernetes’ native deployment automation, scaling and management capabilities. At launch, it will empower organizations to deploy the software on their platform of choice alongside the full spectrum of ECS appliances, making ObjectScale a solution for edge environments in addition to the traditional data center. Together, ObjectScale and ECS will deliver an richer object storage portfolio.

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^(*) Based on Dell internal analysis comparing the max bandwidth of the ECS EXF900 (511MB/s) to the max bandwidth of the ECS EX300 (24MB/s) for 10KB writes, November 2020. Actual performance will vary.
^(**) Based on Dell internal analysis comparing transactions per second (TPS) of the ECS EXF900 (49,915 files/s) to the TPS of the ECS EX300 (2,551 files/s) for 10KB writes, November 2020. Actual performance will vary.

Resource:
ECS appliances