EMC Ships New 'Self-Service' Cloud Storage Package

Storage giant EMC, which lately has been positioning itself more often as a provider of cloud computing infrastructure, on Dec. 14 launched what it claims is the industry's first self-service cloud-enablement platform for storage.

EMC's Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform, aimed at ISPs, storage providers and large enterprises that want to resell or redistribute cloud services, incorporates system metering controls along with standard cloud administration and multitenancy, chargeback and billing features into one platform.

Because so much of the package is preconfigured, Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform allows service providers to deliver a complete storage-as-a-service package to their own customers within days as opposed to weeks or months. Atmos eliminates the need for an in-house development job that can take months, EMC said.

Atmos is a complete self-service software package that includes end-user identity provisioning and resource reporting on bandwidth and storage consumption. This includes a metering module that measures bandwidth and storage at the end-user level, a necessary feature for ISPs when managing multitenant and multiuser environments.

The metering module also enables chargeback and billing integration capabilities for private and public cloud environments. The platform is designed with flexibility in mind. Service providers and enterprises can access these self-service and metering capabilities through an existing customer-facing portal that connects to the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform or through a standard portal that is offered as part of the platform.

Atmos Cloud Delivery works alongside EMC's central Atmos platform, which automatically manages the global availability of unstructured data through a policy managed, scale-out object storage infrastructure. Service providers can deliver public cloud storage services to their customers with the combination of EMC Atmos and the EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform.

"The benefits of cloud storage services are simplicity, flexibility and new levels of business agility," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Service providers and enterprises alike need a solution that enables them to quickly and easily build a flexible foundation for cloud-enabled services.

"The EMC Amos Cloud Delivery Platform's self-service identity provisioning, resource reporting on bandwidth and storage consumption, and easy metering capabilities for chargeback and billing is a compelling solution that helps fill the gaps."

EMC said the new package became available beginning Dec. 14.