EMC Upgrades Enterprise Cloud Storage with Atmos OnLine

EMC is demonstrating to the enterprise IT world that it is serious about investing time, capital and energy in Atmos, its new cloud infrastructure products and services package.

On May 18 the company expanded its cloud portfolio by launching EMC Atmos OnLine, which offers cloud storage capacity that includes enterprise-level services such as data-movement policies and data-retention controls.

The announcement was made on May 18, the opening day of the EMC World users' conference in Orlando, Fla. EMC, the world's largest external-storage infrastructure company, typically makes a series of announcements during the conference.

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Atmos: Do-it-yourself cloud building

EMC launched Atmos, its first cloud-building appliance package, on Nov. 10, 2008. Atmos is a custom-designed combination of software and industry-standard x86 server hardware that results in a privately owned and operated, multipetabyte, enterprise-level cloud storage infrastructure.

With the new cloud capability, EMC provides what it calls "internal-to-external federation," or movement, of a client's data set within the Atmos cloud environment. This enables customers to easily move any amount of data from on-site to off-site Atmos clouds.

For example, a client can dictate policies to federate an enterprise's information residing on an infrastructure of any size to an external Atmos storage cloud run by EMC in order to gain cost efficiency and collaboration capabilities, as needed. Small amounts of data can be federated into cloud storage as needed.

Federation is a significant step in the adoption of cloud-based computing models, since most enterprises are not comfortable moving all of their information into a cloud infrastructure.

"It is clear that IT organizations have the desire to adopt cloud storage technologies. It is also clear that they must maintain the necessary controls over where their data resides while preserving the investments of existing applications and infrastructures," said Benjamin S. Woo, vice president of Enterprise Storage Systems Research at IDC.

Atmos with federation provides the cost and operational efficiency of cloud storage while users retain control over which—and how much—data resides either on-site or off-site.

The federation feature will be available in EMC Atmos by the end of June. Go here to see a preview.