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Forecast: Shakeups Looming in the Cloud: Page 2 of 3

The 100 million-object limit would certainly need modification given the continued explosion of unstructured data creation and demand for highly flexible storage. EMC has stretched as far as it can with Atmos and now will recoil to Isilon. This reminds me of EMC's approach to a bygone product, Invista--a great idea for storage virtualization, yet, unfortunately, ahead of its time.

So, I suppose you heard the prediction here first: Atmos will become the next Invista--a quietly retired product that no doubt blazed a trail for others and for newer technology from EMC.

Prediction #2
Oracle is poised to deliver real cloud, and is stirring up the electrons and creating enough static to create considerable thunder and lightning in the cloud. Oracle has been somewhat catatonic, and has continued to insist that cloud resides inside of its Exalogic boxes, which, in my opinion, are the direct opposite of a cloud approach in the first place, with their pay-up-front-and-I'll-drop-some-hardware-on-your-floor-type business model.

After a number of discussions with IT customer organizations and channel partners, I am led to believe that Oracle will rise out of its slumber, stop cloud-washing  its existing cluster file system-type software, and acquire a company with a massive cloud object store. Once Oracle makes the acquisition it will have the ability to support over a billion files, consumption-based billing and secure multitenancy. It will layer all this atop its existing Red Stack--a very powerful combination.

Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp and EMC should make some strategic moves before Oracle executes in the cloud space and comes out charging with a hurricane of a product.