Dell ECS EX Series, Hardware Manual

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EX-Series Hardware Overview
Topics:
• Introduction
• Rack and node host names
Introduction
This guide describes the hardware components that make up the ECS appliance Generation 3 (Gen3) hardware models.
ECS Gen3 appliance series
The ECS Gen3 appliance series include:
● EX500 series: A dense object storage solution of hyper-converged nodes for small to medium-sized ECS deployments.
The EX500 supports node expansion in increments of one when the capacity is the same as the previous node. If the
capacity is different from the previous node when expanding, EX500 supports expansion in a minimum of five-node
increments. The recommended expansion is five nodes. The EX500 series supports from 5 to 16 nodes per rack. With
different drive sizes/quantity and the flexibility of node additions, this platform can scale from 480 TB RAW to 6.144 PB
RAW per rack.
● EX300 series: A dense object storage solution of hyper-converged nodes for small to medium-sized ECS deployments. With
different drive sizes and the flexibility of single node addition, this platform can scale from 60 TB RAW to 3.08 PB RAW per
rack.
● EX3000 series: An ultradense object storage solution of hyper-converged nodes for medium to large-sized ECS deployments.
This platform starts at a 2.16 PB RAW minimum configuration and scales to 11.52 PB RAW per rack.
Note: In this document, the term node is used interchangeably with server , and the term appliance references a cluster of nodes
running ECS software.
Hardware generations
ECS appliances are characterized by hardware generation.
Gen3
● EX500 Gen3 models featuring 8 TB or 12 TB disks (12 or 24 x HDD per node) became available in September 2019. ECS 3.5
and later supports 16TB data drives and optional Read Cache SSD upgrade.
● EX300 Gen3 models featuring 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB, or 8 TB disks (12 HDD per 2U node) became available in August 2018. ECS
3.5 and later supports 16TB data drives and optional Read Cache SSD upgrade..
● EX3000 Gen3 models featuring 12 TB disks (4U chassis with single or dual node configurations) became available in August
2018. ECS 3.5 and later supports 16TB data drives and optional Read Cache SSD upgrade.
Gen2
For documentation on Gen2 hardware, see the Dell EMC ECS D- and U-Series Hardware Guide .
● U-Series Gen2 models featuring 12 TB disks became available in March 2018.
● The D-Series was introduced in October 2016 featuring 8 TB disks. D-Series models featuring 10 TB disks became available
March 2017.
● The original U-Series appliance (Gen1) was replaced in October 2015 with second-generation hardware (Gen2).
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