Why Enterprises Are
Switching from ECS to
Switching from ECS to
There is a significant shift occurring in the enterprise
when it comes to storage.
There is a significant shift occurring in the enterprise when it comes to storage. The traditional inflexible appliance-based, archival model for object storage is being phased out. Modern, cloud-native architectures have no use for old school, cheap, deep and slow storage.
It is a new world, driven by developers, data scientists and data engineers. IT still has a critical role to play - but it is fundamentally different and this is driving enterprise-wide change.
Part of this change is the retirement of ECS object storage appliances in favor of cloud-native, software-defined object storage that runs on commodity servers. Every enterprise is seeing this shift - and it is epitomized in a single statistic: 77% of the Fortune 100 run MinIO.
That alone is probably not going to convince you. Here are some more reasons.
In the world of software development, accessibility is everything. MinIO’s open-source software allows developers to access, modify, and enhance the system, tailoring it to fit their specific requirements.
It is more than just open source, however, MinIO is obsessed with the developer experience and creates optionality into its products. Where needed, MinIO will build in its own capabilities while retaining access to the entire cloud-native ecosystem. Take a look at this post to understand this obsession better and what we have done for Key Encryption and Management, Load Balancing, Identity and Access Management - even SDK.
We are developers and we think like them.
MinIO is renowned for its lightning-fast speed, ensuring smooth and efficient operations. Speed is not a vanity metric, it is a means to an end with the end being more workloads.
That is why MinIO is the go to object store for analytics workloads, application workloads and AI/ML workloads and is the foundation for modern data lakes. MinIO is orders of magnitude faster than ECS and publishes every one of its benchmarks as an invitation to match our performance.
MinIO’s GETs/PUTs results exceed 325 GiB/sec and 165 GiB/sec on 32 nodes of NVMe drives and a 100GbE network. Its combination of chip-level acceleration, atomic metadata and Golang/Golang Assembly code enable it to fly on commodity hardware pushing the bottleneck to the network bandwidth.
More importantly, MinIO’s performance covers the entire range of object sizes from the smallest (4 KB) to the largest (50 TiB). No one has invested more time and effort into optimizing for small objects and our benchmarks prove it.
Dell ECS, on the other hand, suffers from multiple performance limitations. Turning on encryption can cause up to a 50% decrease in throughput. Turning on ADO (access during outage) cuts performance by another third – and forces ECS into eventual data consistency. Dell suggests terminating SSL at the load-balancer so as not to decrease performance further.
Not all S3 compatibility is the same - many object storage vendors support a small fraction of overall functionality - and this causes applications to fail. Others claim comprehensive coverage but their proprietary software or appliance models limit that claim considerably as a small fraction of applications, hardware and software are tested.
MinIO is unique in its ability to support its claim of S3 compatibility. With tens of thousands of customers and open source users, our S3 API compatibility is the most widely tested and implemented in the world - covering millions of combinations of hardware, software and applications. MinIO releases software weekly and any shortcoming to the S3 API is immediately reported by the community and rectified by MinIO.
Rumor has it that even Amazon tests third party S3 compatibility using MinIO.
MinIO is kept opinionated, but not political. We do not believe in keeping legacy functionality that in the end results in a bad developer experience. We do not believe in adding options for the sake of adding them. More options are rarely better. Instead we will attempt to cover these cases with different code paths and select the optimal path when feasible. We add options when there is a genuine need for them, instead of when we cannot easily determine the optimal value.
We believe that keeping MinIO opinionated benefits everybody in the long run, making it easier to use and with fewer edge cases to take care of. This makes MinIO behave its best – right out of the box.
You would be hard-pressed to say this about twenty year old code that predated the invention of Kubernetes.
The MinIO binary is less than 100 MB. It can run locally on the developer laptop but can scale to power the datacenter. This allows a developer to begin a project with minimal investment, even running MinIO in a container, and when that project takes flight, it can move all the way to the cloud without modification or changes in performance.
Just as importantly, MinIO will run on hardware that ECS only dreams of - on the factory floor, the 4G POP or SpaceX Titan rockets.
MinIO’s commitment to supporting multiple data types, from unstructured data like logs and images to semi-structured and structured data, appeals to the multi-faceted needs of modern enterprises. With MinIO, there are no constraints. We allow developers to manipulate and handle different data types efficiently, making it a flexible and practical tool for diverse development tasks. For IT buyers, that means happier end customers - internally and externally.
We support every open data standard and our work on open table format (Delta, Apache Iceberg and Hudi), is considered required reading by most developers.
MinIO’s object transforms allow developers to create handlers using their preferred programming language, allowing objects stored in one format to be streamed in any format required.
Open table formats are just getting started - they require a cloud-native mentality to optimize against.
MinIO allows enterprises to scale their storage infrastructure without having to be storage or infrastructure experts. MinIO is designed for the entire range of enterprise users - from developers to data scientists, from AI/ML teams to data engineers.
MinIO can seamlessly manage terabytes or petabytes of data, making it perfect for developers working on applications built for scale. MinIO delivers the rare combination of performance at scale for whatever your application requires. This is really important. Scalability doesn’t matter if performance grinds to a halt at a few petabytes.
MinIO is purpose built for performance at scale and this is why the world’s largest video streamer and the largest online payment processor run their business on MinIO.
Further, MinIO’s distributed architecture ensures that data stored on MinIO can be scaled across multiple drives (and drive types), servers, data centers, and even geographical regions. This scalability becomes vital when applications need to handle peak loads and vast amounts of data.
In an era where data breaches are increasingly common, security is a priority for developers. MinIO is designed with state-of-the-art security features that include encrypted data communication, robust access policies, and support for Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategies.
These features are designed around the entire ecosystem of enterprise users so they can build and connect secure applications and guarantee the safety of their data.
MinIO is, in its entirety, FIPS 140-2 certified, while only the ECS encryption module (D@RE) is FIPS 140-2 certified.
Perhaps most importantly, because MinIO is open-source it is constantly tested, probed and hacked on. This results in a product that is far more robust than proprietary appliance software for whom only the hackers know the vulnerabilities. Sophisticated enterprises know that security is the secret weapon of open source.
In the realm of software development, robust documentation can be the difference between a product loved or loathed by developers and IT alike. MinIO is loved. Developers use MinIO’s SDKs in place of those from AWS. That speaks volumes about our commitment to documentation.
MinIO excels in providing clear, comprehensive documentation, making it easy for developers to understand and implement its functionalities. Additionally, MinIO’s active community of developers and contributors is a testament to its popularity. This community offers valuable resources and problem-solving perspectives that are incredibly helpful for developers.
MinIO runs anywhere - public cloud, private cloud, colo or edge. ECS runs in a on-prem rack. Multiple ECS installations share data via replication, but turning on ADO for high-availability and replicating between clusters of appliances incurs a penalty: Data is eventually, not immediately, consistent across the entire multi-cloud.
This extensibility makes it ideal for the team that needs their solution to run anywhere their applications do. MinIO is the only object store to be found on every cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM, Alibaba, Tencent, OVH, etc.) providing the comfort of knowing that consistency doesn’t come at a cost.
Enterprise technologists like to know what’s going on - that is why they value MinO’s extensive support for Prometheus and Grafana, its alerting framework, its support for lambda compute and notifications and MinIO’s event logs. Together it produces a software stack where troubleshooting is efficient and performance is measurable.
Feel free to check out our "out of the box" dashboards or build your own. Prometheus and Grafana not in your quiver - MinIO works with any cloud-native observability suite.
As a software-defined, open-source solution that was born in the cloud - no object store gives its users more control. Control over the architecture, the security, the resilience, the access. Enterprises crave control and it is why they pick MinIO over ECS - because how much control over an appliance can you have?
MinIO just works. Nothing is more endearing to an architect, developer or IT buyer than something they can depend on. MinIO does what it is supposed to, when it is supposed to and how it is supposed to - even in failure. We have 1M people downloading the code every day as proof.
Any object store, and in particular, software defined object stores should support both API and Command Line Interface options as well as robust Graphical User Interface options. Both options should have a premium on simplicity while ensuring a complete range of capabilities.
MinIO obsesses over its interfaces from Console to Operator.
Simple. Intuitive. Efficient.
Modern software has modern support. Forget about the old-school game of telephone between you and your SE who translates to the support engineer who gives you a link to some docs. That model doesn’t work in the always-on enterprise.
MinIO re-invented enterprise support with 24/7/365 direct to engineer support. That’s it - have an issue, communicate with an engineer. Nothing solves problems faster.
With SUBNET, organizations gain access to end-to-end monitoring, automated support tools and diagnostics. SUBNET provides a secure communication channel to exchange logs and certified software binaries. As a result, through SUBNET, MinIO can guide its customers through critical bug fixes, security patches and other optimizations for their production instances. It is specifically designed for fast paced devops-centric infrastructure where issues need to be resolved in real time.
If you want to go deeper, hit some of the resources below, email us at hellofoo@min.io or complete the form at the bottom of the page.
