Home > Storage > ObjectScale and ECS > Product Documentation > ECS with F5 Deployment Reference Guide > Introduction
The explosive growth of unstructured data and cloud-native applications has created demand for scalable cloud storage infrastructure in the modern datacenter. ECSTM is the third generation object store by Dell EMC™ designed from the ground up to take advantage of modern cloud storage APIs and distributed data protection, providing active/active availability spanning multiple datacenters.
Managing application traffic locally and globally can provide high availability (HA) and efficient use of ECS storage resources. HA is obtained by directing application traffic to known-to-be-available local or global storage resources. Optimal efficiency can be gained by balancing application load across local storage resources.
Organizations often choose F5® BIG-IP® DNS (formerly Global Traffic Manager™) and Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM®) products to manage client traffic between and within data centers. BIG-IP authoritatively resolves domain names such as s3.dell.com or nfs.emc.com. BIG-IP DNS systems return IP addresses which direct stateless client sessions to an ECS system at a particular data center based on monitoring the availability and performance of individual ECS data center locations, nodes, and client locations. LTMs can apply load balancing services based on availability, performance, and persistence, to proxy client traffic to an ECS node.