Some customers have the resources to pursue a do-it-yourself approach to their data center infrastructure. They have the resources and buying power to purchase their own hardware and switches, and commodity servers, and deploy their own OS images. For a customer deploying ViPR Services on 3rd party commodity, ViPR adds value by simplifying management such as monitoring the health of the nodes, provisioning, and upgrade and patch management.  With ViPR Services on commodity, management is a joint effort between the customer and EMC but more of the responsibility is on the customer. For initial setup, the customer buys the hardware/switches etc., racks and stacks commodity servers, deploys OS images and connects the infrastructure to the network. The customer configures DNS, NTP, IP, enables SSH on nodes, and provides infrastructure topology. ViPR sets up fabric and services (HDFS, Object, etc.), provisions disk for object / HDFS use and monitors health of the hardware.  Maintenance is a customer-driven operation. The customer is responsible for updating firmware and adding nodes and disks. ViPR will update the OS, the fabric, and the ViPR software. ViPR performs OS patch rollout with coordination of commodity stack.  In contrast, ECS appliance is an integrated appliance that features the ViPR software on a low-cost, high-density, scale-out commodity hardware platform. ECS appliance is suited for the customer that wants everything included in one box without having to buy and rack and stack their own gear. Plus, the customer gets the added benefit of full support from EMC. The chart below compares the two approaches:  [IMAGE]
How does EMC support and management differ if I want to run ViPR on my own commodity JBOD vs. buying the ECS Appliance?
ViPR on commodity JBOD vs. buying the ECS Appliance