EMC Repositions Atmos Online Storage Service

EMC, in a corporate move apparently unrelated to the same-day acquisition of cloud storage analytics provider Greenplum, told eWEEK July 7 that it is recommissioning its Atmos Online storage service.
Atmos Online, which had a soft launch about 14 months ago at EMC World 2009, is an EMC enterprise cloud storage service that as of July 7 is no longer available for production use.
Atmos Online provides cloud storage capacity that includes enterprise-level services such as data-movement policies and data-retention controls.
EMC is redirecting it to be used only for test and development purposes for ISV partners and customers, John Martin, director of product management and marketing for EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure group, told eWEEK.
In a nutshell, this means that EMC has decided not to provide standard storage support services, such as go-to-market marketing and sales support, that it would normally offer with a such a commercial service product.
Martin told eWEEK that the original idea for Atmost Online was for customers “to get familiar with the Atmos API, get integrated with the new technology and understand how it works.
“We were about to make a ‘go-live’ announcement with Atmos Online, but we reflected on our suite of offerings, then made a decision to not go forward with it as a business offering, but to support our service-provider partners in their [own] Internet-delivered storage service offerings,” Martin said.
AT&T, for example, has an Atmos Online deployment that it has rebranded as Synaptic storage as a service which is based on the Atmos technology and presents the Atmos Web services API as the presentation layer, Martin said.
“We’ve seen pretty good traction and adoption from the service provider community, [but] we also have seen that working with that community goes beyond delivering technology,” Martin said. “That really means that they are looking for marketing support, go-to-market support, and sales training and enablement.”
Martin said that EMC made the decision to “focus our energies on supporting the service provider go-to-market avenue as opposed to delivering an EMC-branded Atmos Online type of an offering.”
Thus, Atmos Online is being repositioned away from a revenue-oriented, SLA-driven service. “We’re going to focus on making this service provider ecosystem system with their [EMC’s customers] Internet-delivered storage services,” Martin said.
Current Production Customers Will Transition
Martin would not disclose to eWEEK a number or ballpark figure on how many current customers this change of focus will affect.
“It’s a manageable number. There are some customers [affected by this change] who are looking to go into production and get an SLA,” Martin said. “They will transition, in most cases, to one of our service provider partners — somebody like an AT&T, who has an Atmos-based service,” Martin said.
The move does not affect AT&T’s customer relationship to EMC, Martin said. AT&T will continue to offer its Atmos-based, branded Synaptic storage service.
Only last February, EMC had upgraded the on-site Atmos infrastructure by upgrading the servers and arrays with the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.