Dell ECS and Amazon EFS are competing in the cloud storage solutions category. Amazon EFS holds an advantage due to its extensive features and seamless integration with AWS services.
Features: Dell ECS offers flexible storage management, multi-protocol support, and is highly beneficial for hybrid cloud environments. Amazon EFS provides auto-scaling capabilities, consistent low latency, and automated backups, making it optimal for AWS users.
Room for Improvement: Dell ECS needs to refine its scalability features, improve integration with non-EMC products, and enhance storage analytics tools. Amazon EFS could benefit from more competitive pricing, enhanced support for non-AWS environments, and improved user interface for complex operations.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EFS offers straightforward deployment with detailed AWS documentation, ideal for AWS ecosystem users. Dell ECS requires a more involved setup process but provides strong customer service with personalized assistance.
Pricing and ROI: Dell ECS is cost-effective with a favorable ROI in hybrid environments, while Amazon EFS's pay-as-you-go pricing may lead to higher costs over time but is justified by its scalability and AWS integration for high-performance applications.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
While the time to respond was good, the time to resolve was not optimal, as it took more than a week.
Amazon's support model is consistent across services.
Training and support depend on the plan you have, with centralized support being very helpful in case issues arise.
There is a lack of SUSE Linux experts which affects the level of support.
The response time and quality of the technical support are satisfactory.
Customer support is generally good but sometimes struggles with complex issues.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
Its auto-scaling feature is a crucial point, providing high scalability that I would rate at ten out of ten.
Elastic File Systems allow me to scale up or down easily.
It is very cost-effective, and there's no need for initial charges.
Through the fabrics, it provides the clustering, allowing us to add nodes easily.
It allows scale-out processes by adding extra nodes, providing flexibility for customers to increase capacity on demand.
I would rate scalability between eight or nine, as it provides a good ability to scale and expand storage.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Amazon EFS is extremely stable, as it is managed by AWS.
While I experienced an EFS mount dropping, it was related to server issues rather than EFS itself.
We have not experienced any outages in the last four years.
I'd rate stability maybe 9.5 out of ten.
Dell ECS provides high stability compared to other object solutions.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
Enabling AI-driven or automatic features would be beneficial for new or nontechnical users.
In my project, there are challenges related to AWS, such as ensuring proper security measures with IMS code and encryption.
Live logs should be viewable through the GUI like with Logstash or Elasticsearch.
The deployment is not easy, and some expertise is required to configure the virtual data center and replication groups.
Incorporating extra integrations beyond S3, like Hadoop file systems, and being well aligned with trends like AI solutions would be beneficial.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
EFS could cost around $30 to $50 per month for similar usage.
Amazon EFS is more costly compared to other storage options available from AWS.
Elastic File Systems can be expensive due to the nature of data transfer costs.
It relies on nearline SAS drives, which are cheaper than flash or SSDs.
The pricing model is on the higher side compared to other vendors.
The price is reasonable given the abundance of features, including managing, control, host resources, dockers, and containers.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Its ease of integration with other AWS services enhances our infrastructure, while the shared storage access improves reliability and processing continuity for our applications.
They help me process data while maintaining low latency, which is crucial for efficient data processing.
The most valuable feature of Amazon EFS is its auto-scaling capability.
The stability of this solution is a major advantage, as we've not experienced any outages in the last four years.
Dell ECS helps with managing storage requirements since it's S3 kind of object storage with all needed enterprise features such as immutability, snapshotting, and application management, which are nice sets of features usually required.
If we encounter any issues or need to upgrade anything, we can simply open a ticket, and the EMC team is there to assist us.
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
When mounted to Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon EFS file system provides a standard file system interface and file system access semantics, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS with your existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, allowing Amazon EFS to provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.
It’s designed for high availability and durability, and provides performance for a broad spectrum of workloads and applications, including Big Data and analytics, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories.
Enterprise-ready. Future-proof. Data-first.
Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a file and object storage solution from Dell EMC. ECS has been created to support both traditional and next-generation ecosystems equally. ECS boasts unrivaled economics, manageability, resilience, and scalability to satisfy the demands of today's next-gen, robust business enterprise ecosystems. ECS can easily be deployed in a software-defined model or as a turn-key appliance. ECS is software-defined and multi-layered for unlimited scalability. Every layer is abstracted and scalable with no single point of failure.
Everything is done within the software, which is containerized, using docker.
ECS is currently deployed using basic commodity hardware, which can easily be federated across as many as eight different locations and managed as a single resource. Additionally, ECS can also protect data at the site level, locally, disk, node, and rack levels. The federation enables a single global namespace with everywhere access to content. Applications can quickly rewrite in an active/active or everywhere active manner.
ECS is also able to be used as secondary storage or archival storage. This will free up valuable primary storage of data that is stale, redundant, or used infrequently, and the data will remain easily accessible. ECS uses policy-based tiering such as Data Domain, Cloud tiering, Isilon using cloud polls, and Geodrive, which give Windows systems direct access to ECS. Windows users can still use server message block (SMB) while leveraging the more expansive ECS storage.
ECS is enterprise-grade and offers valuable features such as retention, multi-tenancy, metering, monitoring, quotas, and more. ECS builds in robust security from the ground up and encrypts data. ECS is compliant with STIG guidelines and adheres to SEC rule 17A-4F.
ECS is an enterprise-ready solution that allows organizations to easily simplify object storage management and visualize information in intuitive new ways, and empowers your business to do even more with data. With ECS, enterprise organizations can deliver cloud-scale economics in-house that will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale, creating greater levels of productivity and profitability.
Reviews from Real Users
One user, who is a deputy director at a tech service company, says ECS offers “good performance, reliability, and technical support”.
Dell EMC ECS is “a stable solution which is easy to scale, install and manage”, relates another user, who is a senior buyer at a tech service company.
"What I like best about this product is that it is a complete solution, both hardware, and software, by the same vendor," summarizes a system engineer at a tech services company.
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