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Dell Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is an enterprise-class object storage platform that is designed for scalability, performance, resilience, and economics.
Deployable as a turnkey appliance or in a software-defined model, the Dell ECS EX-Series delivers rich S3-compatibility on a globally distributed architecture. It empowers organizations to support enterprise workloads such as cloud-native, archive, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and big data analytics applications at scale.
The benefits of ECS include:
ECS is optimized for a broad range of use cases, including:
In this design, the ECS EX500 can be used for Splunk SmartStore-based storage tiering, for storage of cold-bucket indexed data.
Local drives in the PowerEdge servers provide primary storage for the environment. A RAID 1 mirror of two SSDs in each server is used for the operating system and installation. For each server assigned a storage role, the remaining drives are assigned to a pool of storage managed by the Robin Cloud Native Storage (Robin CNS) layer. This pool is used to provision persistent volume claims made through the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI). You can organize the storage pool into storage classes with different characteristics, including media type, replication, fault domains, and workload characteristics.
An independent ECS cluster provides secondary storage for the environment. The ECS cluster is used as a remote S3-compatible object store.
Storage allocation shows the recommended configuration for Splunk Enterprise. This configuration uses Splunk SmartStore for:
The Splunk indexes must be configured to enable SmartStore and provide the balance that you want between hot and warm storage for index data. The warm storage is provisioned from the object storage class. See
Splunk best practices
for more information.Robin Cloud Native Platform (Robin CNP) includes a software-defined storage that supports a comprehensive set of application-aware services, including snapshots, clone, backup, encryption, and business continuity. All data services are application-aware. They track data storage, metadata, and the Kubernetes application configuration, protecting a wide range of datasets for “application-consistent” disaster recovery of complex network and storage intensive stateful applications.
With Robin Cloud Native Storage (Robin CNS) all life cycle and data protection operations are performed in the context of the entire application aware state (data, metadata, and Kubernetes configuration), not just storage volumes.