ECS is deployed on a set of qualified industry standard hardware or as a turnkey storage appliance. The main components of ECS are the:
- ECS Portal and Provisioning Services - API-based WebUI and CLI for self-service, automation, reporting, and management of ECS nodes. This layer also handles licensing, authentication, multi-tenancy, and provisioning services such as namespace creation.
- Data Services - Services, tools and APIs to support object and file access to the system.
- Storage Engine - Core service responsible for storing and retrieving data, managing transactions, and protecting and replicating data locally and between sites.
- Fabric - Clustering service for health, configuration, and upgrade management and alerting.
- Infrastructure - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for the base operating system in the turnkey appliance or qualified Linux operating systems for industry standard hardware configuration.
- Hardware - A turnkey appliance or qualified industry standard hardware.
The following figure shows a graphical view of these layers which are described in detail in the sections that follow.
![Hardware layer is on the bottom with Infrastructure layer on top of it. ECS software on top of Infrastructure layer with Fabric, Storage Engine, Data Services and the Provisioning Portal layers up from it.](/static/media/9198938f-8c47-5a0e-82d9-6db6a62cd3f7/DAM-9c644ca0-dfff-48b5-818f-0997248416ca/out/4628.005.png)
Figure 1. ECS architecture layers