# EMC (Dell EMC)

> EMC Corporation, acquired by Dell Technologies in 2016 and now operating as Dell EMC,
> builds enterprise storage, data management and data protection platforms. Two management
> APIs are profiled here: the ECS Management REST API for ECS/ObjectScale object storage,
> and the Unisphere REST API for the Unity and PowerMax array families. Both are appliance
> APIs — they are served by hardware the customer owns, not by an EMC-operated endpoint.

## What an agent needs to know first

- There is no public base URL. Both APIs run on the customer's own array, so every base is
  templated: `https://{ecs_management_host}:4443` for ECS, `https://{unisphere_host}:8443/univmax/restapi`
  for Unisphere for PowerMax.
- There is no signup, no API key, no plan and no rate limit. Access requires credentials on
  an array you already operate.
- No OpenAPI is publicly downloadable. Dell publishes API references on developer.dell.com,
  but the portal is a client-rendered SPA whose specification API returns HTTP 401 to
  anonymous callers.
- The best machine-readable descriptions of these APIs are EMC's own client libraries,
  which are public on GitHub. This file's derived artifacts were built from them.

## APIs

- [EMC ECS Management REST API](https://developer.dell.com/): Namespaces, tenants, buckets,
  object users, secret keys, storage pools, replication groups, virtual data centers,
  metering, alerts and configuration for ECS/ObjectScale object storage. Auth: HTTP Basic
  login exchanged for an `X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN` session header.
- [EMC Unisphere REST API](https://developer.dell.com/): Storage provisioning, performance
  monitoring, alert management and system configuration for Unity and PowerMax arrays.
  Auth: HTTP Basic or `Authorization: Bearer`. API version 104 (Unisphere 10.4.0).

## Data-plane protocols (ECS)

ECS is a multi-protocol object store. An application that already speaks any of these
integrates by changing an endpoint, not by writing a connector:

- Amazon S3 REST API
- OpenStack Swift Object API
- EMC Atmos Object API
- EMC CAS (Centera lineage), for write-once compliance archiving
- Hadoop HDFS
- NFSv3

## First-party SDKs

- [PyU4V](https://pypi.org/project/PyU4V/) (Python, Unisphere for PowerMax, 10.4.0.0)
- [storops](https://pypi.org/project/storops/) (Python, Unity and VNX, 1.2.12)
- [python-ecsclient](https://github.com/EMCECS/python-ecsclient) (Python, ECS Management API, 1.1.12 — last released 2022)
- [gounity](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dell/gounity), [gopowermax](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dell/gopowermax/v2), [goisilon](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dell/goisilon), [goscaleio](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dell/goscaleio) (Go)
- [com.emc.ecs:object-client](https://search.maven.org/artifact/com.emc.ecs/object-client) (Java, ECS object protocols)
- [ECSManagementSDK](https://www.nuget.org/packages/ECSManagementSDK) (.NET, ECS Management API)
- Terraform providers: [dell/objectscale](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dell/objectscale/latest), [dell/powermax](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dell/powermax/latest), [dell/powerscale](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dell/powerscale/latest), [dell/powerstore](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dell/powerstore/latest)

## Try it without an array

- [ECS Community Edition](https://github.com/EMCECS/ECS-CommunityEdition): EMC's free,
  self-deployable build of the ECS platform, management API included. Release tags name the
  exact ECS or ObjectScale build they install.

## Errors

ECS returns a vendor JSON envelope, not RFC 9457 problem+json:
`{ "code": <int>, "retryable": <bool>, "description": <string>, "details": <string> }`.
176 numeric codes are published inside EMC's own Python client. `retryable` is the only
machine-readable retry hint and it is per-response, not per-code.

## Reversibility — read before writing

Most destructive ECS operations are expressed as a `deactivate` sub-resource rather than an
HTTP DELETE, which is a soft delete. EMC does not publish the recovery window or the
reactivation operation for any of them. Two operations are genuinely one-way:
`DELETE vdc/data-services/varrays/{id}` (storage pool) and `PUT object/bucket/{id}/retention`
(within the retention period). No idempotency key exists on any write.

## Security

- [Dell Security and Trust Center](https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/about-us/security-and-trust-center/index.htm):
  ISO 27001, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS Level 2, Common Criteria EAL2+, O-TTPS,
  TISAX, IRAP and others. Reports are obtained through a Dell representative, not downloaded.
- [Dell Vulnerability Response Policy](https://www.dell.com/support/dell-vulnerability-response-policy)
- Bug bounty: [Dell Products](https://bugcrowd.com/dell-product) and [Dell Applications](https://bugcrowd.com/dell-com) on Bugcrowd.
- `https://www.dell.com/.well-known/security.txt` is served (HTTP 200) but its Expires field
  reads 2026-04-17 and it is therefore stale.

## Repositories

- [github.com/EMCECS](https://github.com/EMCECS) — the original EMC Elastic Cloud Storage organization
- [github.com/dell](https://github.com/dell) — current Dell EMC engineering organization
- [github.com/emccorp](https://github.com/emccorp) — legacy EMC container-storage drivers

## Not published

No MCP server, no A2A agent card, no AsyncAPI or webhook surface, no OAuth or OpenID Connect,
no API status page, no deprecation policy or Sunset headers, no API changelog, no rate limits,
no API plans or pricing, no public Postman workspace that could be verified.