Question: What ECS appliance configurations are available?
Current Gen3 ECS hardware includes classes of nodes for the EX500, EX5000, and EXF900:
- The EX500 appliance is a dual socket, multi-core CPU node type which aims to provide a balance of performance and density. It supports either 64GB or 192GB RAM for each node. With options for 12 or 24 drives, this series provides a versatile option for midsize enterprises looking to support modern applications and/or deep archive use cases. HDD size can be 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 12TB,16TB, and 20TB.
- EX5000 is the next generation of ECS dense appliance that refreshes EX3000. EX5000 has a maximum capacity of 11.2 PB of raw storage per rack using the 16TB disks, and can grow into exabytes across several sites, providing a deep and scalable solution. EX5000 is a 5U system that can hold up to 100 drives per system. These nodes are available in two different configurations: EX5000S and EX5000D:
- The EX5000S is a single-node chassis with options for 25, 50, 75, and 100 drives.
- The EX5000D is a dual-node chassis with 50 and 100 drives.
EX5000 is designed with 192GB memory and Intel® Xeon® Gold 6230R 26 core CPUs, making it up to 3x faster than EX3000. EX5000 is supported to be used to expand an existing EX3000 VDC, however, it requires a new rack due to higher power needs. To add EX5000 to an existing rack, submit an RPQ to Dell Professional Services.
- The EXF900 is a dual socket, multi-core CPU node,192GB RAM with an all-flash object storage solution of hyper-converged nodes for low latency and high Input or Transactions Per Second (TPs) ECS deployments. It has options for 12 or 24 disks and 3.84TB, 7.68 and 15.36 NVMe SSD per node.
All drive sizes must be consistently the same within the node. Node sizes may be mixed within a cluster if each new node size is introduced by a minimum size storage group.
Here are the previous model definitions: EX300 (3,072TB), EX3000 (11,520TB), U400 (320TB), U400E (400TB), U480E (480TB), U400T (640TB), U2000 (1,920TB), U2800 (2,880TB), U4000 (3,840TB), D4500 (4,480TB), D5600 (5600 TB), D6200 (6,272TB), and D7800 (7840TB).
An optional SSD drive for metadata caching is available as of ECS 3.5. Former deployments are upgradable using separate drive upgrade kits. If a caching SSD is added to a Virtual Data Center (VDC), every node in the VDC is required to have the caching SSD installed.
ECS version 3.8.0.1 supports memory upgrade expansion to 192 GB on EX300, EX500, EX3000, and Gen 2 platforms, with the support of Dell Professional Services.
Question: What switches are used?
ECS switching components and architecture were modified to include a back-end (BE) switch network for private admin connections, and a front-end (FE) switch network for customer public network connection. It should be noted that all node-to-node communication still travels over the FE switches for current releases.
For EX500 and EX5000 series:
- Two optional Dell Networking S5248F 25 GbE 1U Ethernet switches can be obtained for network connection or the customer can provide their own 25 GbE HA pair for the FE network. If S5248F 25 GbE front-end switches are used, then 2 x 200 GbE VLT cables are needed.
- For the backend (BE), two Dell Networking S5248F 25 GbE 1U Ethernet switches with 48 x 25 GbE SFP ports and 4 x 100 GbE uplink ports and 2 x 200 GbE VLT must be included in the configuration.
For EXF900 series:
- Two optional Dell Networking S5248F 25 GbE 1U Ethernet switches can be obtained for network connection, or the customer may provide their own 25 GbE HA pair for the FE network. If S5248F 25 GbE front-end switches are used, then 2 x 200 GbE VLT cables are needed.
- For the back-end (BE), two Dell Networking S5248F 25 GbE 1U Ethernet switches with 48 x 25 GbE SFP ports and 4 x 100 GbE uplink ports and 2 x 200 GbE VLT must be included in the configuration.
- For intra-rack back-end networks, two aggregation switches Dell S5232 with 28 x 100 GbE ports and 4 x 100 GbE VLT are needed between multiple racks.
Question: Is there a limit on number of nodes that ECS can scale up to?
ECS is a distributed system with no limit to the number of nodes.