ECS is a strongly consistent, indexed, object storage platform. It is a scalable solution providing secure multitenancy and superior performance for both small and large objects. ECS was built as a completely distributed system following cloud principles. The ECS software running on commodity nodes forms the underlying cloud storage, providing protection, geo replication, and data access. The software was built with the following design principles in mind:

• Layered services for horizontal scalability
• Both the index and data use the same underlying storage mechanism
• Good small and large object performance
• Multiple protocol access—Object, HDFS, and File
• Geo replication with lower storage and Wide Area Network (WAN) overhead
• Global access—Read and writes access from any site within a replication group

The following figure illustrates the different layers of ECS. For additional information, see the ECS Overview and Architecture white paper.

Figure 1.   ECS layers