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ECS is a consortium of software, hardware nodes with disks and switches working together seamlessly to provide access to object storage data. ECS provides object and file storage. Object access using S3, Atmos, and Swift on the ECS storage platform is achieved using REST APIs. Objects are written, retrieved, updated, and deleted using HTTP or HTTPS calls of GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and HEAD. For file access, ECS provides NFS version 3 natively. Applications accessing ECS send requests to the ECS data head services that are responsible for taking client requests, extracting required information, and passing it to the storage engine and hardware for further processing (for example read, write, and so on) as shown in Figure 1.
Each of the supported protocols communicates to ECS using specified ports as highlighted in Table 1. ECS also supports the CAS protocol; however, a load balancer is not required since the Centera SDK has a built-in load balancer.
ECS Protocol | Transport Protocol or Daemon Service | Port |
S3 | HTTP | 9020 |
HTTPS | 9021 | |
Atmos | HTTP | 9022 |
HTTPS | 9023 | |
Swift | HTTP | 9024 |
HTTPS | 9025 | |
NFS | mountd, nfsd | 2049 |
portmap | 111 | |
lockd | 10000 |
These ports are important when configuring ECS with NGINX and need to be open in your firewall in order to access objects using the above protocols. For more information about ECS ports, see the ECS Security Configuration and Hardening Guide.