EMC Boosts Its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform

EMC has enhanced its Atmos cloud service with the EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform, which provides Atmos users, such as Internet service providers, with functionality such as provisioning, metering and billing so licensees don't have to provide those capabilities themselves. The product means that the Atmos users can deliver cloud services to their own customers more quickly and with smaller in-house development teams. In addition, EMC has enhanced its Atmos service by improving its multitenancy capabilities to boost security and operational efficiencies. The company has also added consulting services to help users develop storage-as-a-service offerings.

Redstor, a cloud storage provider, has been using the new product for two or three months for its network of several thousand direct customers, primarily schools, and 170 partners, which in turn service up to 17,000 customers, says Tony Ruane, business development director and co-founder of Redstor. "It certainly makes our life a bit easier having that billing and metering stuff all built in," he says. "It makes developing Web portals for ourselves and for our partners so much easier." With the product, his company would be able to deploy cloud storage products in about three weeks, he says. "That's what you want when you're in the business we're in," he says. "You don't want to take six months."

The Atmos platform, which EMC announced two years ago, is intended to support consumer and business users of unstructured information such as photos, music and videos for up to hundreds of terabytes into the petabyte--and ultimately exabyte--scale, says Jon Martin, director of product management and marketing of the Cloud Infrastructure Group for EMC.

Self service and metering are key tenets to enabling cloud infrastructure, a technology that, despite all the buzz the past two years, is still in its infancy, according to Terri McClure, a senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, a Milford, Mass., consultancy. McClure said this release fills in the gaps and rounds out the functionality required to fully realize the benefits of cloud storage, as well as demonstrates that EMC is continuing to deliver on the roadmap it laid out for Atmos at the beginning of the year.

The EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform product is available now and has been shipping for a couple of weeks. It is priced on a capacity-based licensing model, with the entry level starting at $90,000 for support of up to 500TB. Users can purchase either the metering component, the Web portal provisioning component or both. The Atmos service also includes a policy manager that lets users tag data with metadata and then develop policy based on that metadata, such as selecting certain data that shouldn't be stored in certain geographic areas or by spinning down disk drives when not in use to save energy.