ECS provides a complete software-defined strongly-consistent, indexed, cloud storage platform that supports the storage, manipulation, and analysis of unstructured data on a massive scale. Client access protocols include S3, with additional Dell EMC extensions to the S3 protocol. Object access for S3 is achieved via REST APIs. Objects are written, retrieved, updated and deleted via HTTP or HTTPS calls using REST verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and HEAD.

ECS was built as a completely distributed system following the principle of cloud applications. In this model, all hardware nodes provide the core storage services. Without dedicated index or metadata master nodes the system has limitless capacity and scalability.

Service communication ports are an integral part of the configuration when configuring a SmartStore index to store index data in ECS. The following table shows the ports that are used with the ECS S3 data service protocol.

Note: An implementation would normally utilize an external IP load balancer to manage traffic flow to the ECS nodes.  

Table 4.      ECS S3 protocol and associated ports