EMC Atmos storage supports internal Cloud deployments
Today's Atmos Cloud storage announcement from EMC is more interesting then it appears on the surface. It seems that EMC has taken the Amazon AWS playbook and implemented a similar approach to distributed storage.
Besides proving my earlier statements suggesting that internal Clouds will become reality, it also shows that the AWS model of using APIs is the right way to go.
So, just what is the new Atmos software?
EMC Atmos combines massive storage capacity and scalability with policy-based information management software to automatically distribute information to anywhere, at anytime. Other features include:
* Powerful object metadata and policy-based information management capabilities combine to intelligently drive information placement and information services.
* Advanced information management services including replication, versioning, compression, de-duplication and disk drive spin-down.
* Web service APIs including REST and SOAP, as well as file-based access provide convenient integration to virtually any application.
The management features sound a lot like what vendors have built on top of AWS.
* Advanced features such as auto-managing and auto-healing capabilities, unified namespace and browser-based administrator tools for increased efficiency at global scale. Combined, these features greatly reduce administration time and can be easily managed from any location.
* Multi-tenant support enabling multiple applications to be served from the same infrastructure. Each application is securely partitioned and data is neither co-mingled nor accessible by other tenants. This feature is ideal for large enterprises providing cloud services for multiple customers or departments within large enterprises.
It's pretty surprising that EMC is the first big vendor to stake a claim in this space. I would have expected Sun to announce something similar already.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
Good post. I?ve been following your posts on internal clouds and I agree with your statements that they are a reality. However I think an internal cloud requires more than web service APIs. There are thousands of applications that that speak standard NFS and CIFS protocols and do not understand web service APIs. These legacy applications will need easy integration and connectivity to internal clouds for the space to prosper. EMC (as well as ParaScale) is delivering the ability for the user to choose between legacy protocols and web service APIs. This will help drive adoption of internal clouds.
Mike Maxey
www.parascale.com