Home > Storage > ObjectScale and ECS > Product Documentation > Dell ECS: Technical FAQ > Networking
Question: What are the common network considerations customers make when deploying ECS?
Each rack has two top-of-rack (TOR) switches which are uplinked to the customer network. The TOR switches carry all traffic except for out-of-band (OOB) management. Best practice is to have a minimum of two uplinks per rack (four minimum). Management, data (read/write) and geo-replication traffic can be separated, virtually or physically, which allows for enhanced security and performance separation.
Question: How many IP addresses are required for an ECS deployment?
A minimum of one IP address for each ECS node is required.
For out of band management, one IP address is required for each ECS node to be managed.
Question: How many switch ports does the customer need to provide?
For each rack a minimum of two 10/25 GbE switch ports in the customer's infrastructure are required, one for each uplink from each TOR switch.
No switch ports are required for the BE switch(es) unless the customer wants to have RMM (Remote Management Module) for Gen2 and iDRAC (integrated Dell Remote Assistance Controller) for Gen3 access. RMM/iDRAC access is optional and would require one or two switch ports in the customer’s infrastructure depending on topology.
Question: How does the network separation work?
ECS supports separating different types of network traffic for security and performance isolation. There is a mode of operation called the network separation mode. In this mode, each node can be configured at the operating system level with up to three IP addresses, or logical networks, for each of the three different types of network traffic. This feature has been designed to provide the flexibility of either creating three separate logical networks for management, replication and data, or combining them to either create two logical networks, for instance management and replication traffic is in one logical network and data traffic in another logical network.