Technology

ScaleIO ECS is a software-only solution that uses application hosts’ local disks to realize a virtual SAN that is comparable to or better than external SAN storage, but at a fraction of the cost and complexity. The lightweight software components of ECS are installed on the application hosts alongside applications like databases and hypervisors, as well as shared-everything applications.

Scalability and Performance

Breaking traditional barriers of storage scalability, ECS scales out to hundreds and thousands of nodes. The parallel architecture and distributed volume layout deliver a massively parallel system where I/O operations do not fly via a central point. As a result, performance can scale linearly with the number of application servers and disks.

The ECS software components were carefully designed and implemented to consume the minimum computing resources required for operation and thus have a negligible impact on the applications running in the hosts.

Elasticity and Resilience

With ECS, any administrator can add, move, or remove servers and capacity on demand during I/O operations. The software responds automatically to any infrastructure change and rebalances data accordingly across the grid. ECS helps ensure the highest level of enterprise-grade resilience by deploying advanced clustering algorithms whose distributed rebuild capabilities achieve the quickest handling of failures while maintaining maximum storage performance.

Platform Agnostic

ECS natively supports all the leading Linux distributions and hypervisors; works agnostically with any SSD or HDD, regardless of type, model, or speed; and runs on x86, ARM, and other chipsets—giving organizations complete freedom of choice.

More About the ECS Technology

For more information on the architecture of ECS, click here to read the ScaleIO ECS Architecture white paper.