SmartStore is an indexer capability that provides a way to use remote S3 object stores, such as ECS, to store indexed data.

As a deployment's data volume increases, demand for storage typically outpaces demand for compute resources. SmartStore allows you to manage your indexer storage and compute resources in a cost-effective manner by scaling those resources separately.

SmartStore introduces a remote storage tier and a cache manager. These features allow data to reside either locally on indexers or on ECS. Data movement between the indexer and ECS is managed by the cache manager, which resides on the indexer.

With SmartStore, you can reduce the indexer storage footprint to a minimum and choose I/O optimized compute resources. Most data resides on ECS, while the indexer maintains a local cache that contains a minimal amount of data: hot buckets, copies of warm buckets participating in active or recent searches, and bucket metadata.

SmartStore offers several advantages to the deployment's indexing tier:

• Reduced storage cost. Your deployment can take advantage of the economy of ECS, instead of relying on costly local storage.
• Access to high availability and data resiliency features available through ECS.
• The ability to scale compute and storage resources separately, thus ensuring that you use resources efficiently.
• Simple and flexible configuration with per-index settings.

An intelligent cache manager ensures that, for most search use cases, SmartStore provides similar performance to local storage configurations.