With the 2017 announcement of the end of life of Centera, many customers have started to replace Centera with ECS. Several of our existing Centera install base customers have the strategy to move to online services or smaller amounts of capacity that make the lifecycle with ECS costly.
The Dell ECS EX500 Performance Nodes based service supports the Centera CAS API and S3 protocol based access to a disaster tolerant Dell ECS infrastructure. The service is delivered from Swiss data centres with a distance between the systems of more than 100km.
The online ECS service presents itself like an on-premises ECS system for Centera applications.
The service is based on ECS EX500 Performance Nodes with 8TB Drives. This gives a good CPU to Disk Capacity ratio ensuring even large migration and load jobs do not run into bottlenecks.
The online ECS systems are starting with 2 Gigabit Ethernet Internet Connections and allow to scale to at least five times more bandwidth.
By using the Performance Models of the EX500 Nodes the read and write response times will beat typical Centera response times by large. Especially read requests will be responded to fast.
However, how fast these response times will be at the application server, is largely out of control of Informatio. We are prepared and the data centre bandwidth allows to scale up further with increasing utilization.
Centera systems using Advanced Retention Management must be migrated using the ECS native transformation. This needs to happen with on premise systems and such an on premise ECS needs to be set up with a passive replication to the online system.
Due to the limitations of being able to support four incoming replications only, the best way is to choose an on premise ECS deployment model.
Each customer namespace can either be configured in compliance or non-compliance mode. Buckets can override this setting from non-compliant to compliant. Be aware, that compliant namespaces do not allow data with a retention period equal to zero being stored. Compliant bucket and namespace capacity need to be billed to the customer as long as the data cannot be deleted.
The online ECS Service is hosted in ISO certified data centres in Switzerland with a geographical separation of more than 100km. Access is differentiated at the protocol level and uses IPSec to encrypt the traffic. When individual client IP Addresses are passed to the online infrastructure, buckets can restrict access to specific IP Addresses.
On top of this the regular restrictions with ID’s and secret’s respectively pea file are implemented. S3 connections will only be supported over https.
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