G2

Verified User

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

11/5/2021

"Set it and forget it archival storage"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage?

ECS is reliable "cheap and deep" storage for your archive tier. For example, use it to tier off of your more expensive, heavier used, faster performing primary NAS storage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage?

This is not necessarily a dislike, but ECS uses the S3 protocol for access, and a lot of traditional SAN/NAS admins might not be familiar with that, so there is a slight learning curve required. I say "slight" because you don't have to learn S3 in depth by any means, but it does require some basic familiarity with S3 to set up the relationship between ECS and the arrays you're tiering from. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage:

Work with your Dell account team. They are second to none and absolutely will get you where you need to be. Use best practices, of course -- don't be a maverick.

On your Isilon, turn on access time tracking so ECS knows what to tier by access time, if that's a policy you intend to use.

This does require some good network folks to help implement (it's not crazy complicated, though). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have multiple petabytes of unstructured data on our Isilon NAS clusters, which is expensive compared to ECS. ECS is designed to be a cheaper, larger solution to offload lesser-used data. So, we have policies in place on our Isilons to move data that hasn't been accessed after a certain amount of time (sometimes 3 years, sometimes 90 days -- your policies can vary) to ECS. A pointer/shortcut for the offloaded file to ECS is then placed on the Isilon. To an end-user, the pointer looks exactly like the real thing, but the actual data lives on ECS instead of Isilon. You can manually recall files back to Isilon if you need to for some reason, or when a user accesses a shortcutted file it gets recalled to Isilon.

So, to summarize, we get space savings on our primary NAS storage, and therefore we save money by not having to buy as much primary storage as we would have to without ECS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.