The big news of the morning here in Orando at EMC World is the launch by the storage infrastructure vendor of EMC Atmos onLine,
which aims to marry the benefits of storage on the cloud with the
management and security tools that enterprise customers demand.
Building on Atmos,
EMC’s policy-based information management platform that was launched
last year, Atmos onLine provides what EMC is calling Cloud Optimized
Storage (COS) capabilities that can scale effectively, coupled with
security and management tools.
While you don’t need Atmos to use Atmos onLine, which EMC views
being available in a hosted service pay-per-use model, for those
businesses that are using Atmos, EMC is offering federation to allow
clients to set policies that determine the automatic federation of
information between the cloud and the on-premises date centre.
In a briefing with the media, Mike Feinberg, EMC’s senior
vice-president, cloud infrastructure group, said the ever increasing
amounts of rich data content being generated require new storage
strategies. He doesn’t see any business moving its storage
infrastructure to the cloud entirely. Rather, it’s always going to be a
hybrid model. But the cloud will need to play an increasing role to
address storage challenges efficiently and with flexibility.
While the enterprise market has been eying the cloud, Feinberg said
they’ve been holding back until there was something enterprise-grade,
that gave them the management tools they have in their data centre and
stronger security features. That’s what EMC has aimed to do with Atmos
onLine.
Availability is expected in the second quarter of 2009, and a preview is available today at www.emccis.com.
Could Atmos onLine be the solution that gets the enterprise to buy
into the cloud? That’s what I’ll be hoping to ask some analysts about
later today. I do think the integration with the data centre is
essential, and attendees are buzzing about the federation capability.
There’s a lot of hype still around cloud storage though. It’s the
marketing buzz-word of the day. Even with a substantive offering,
breaking through the hype will be a challenge.
Look for more analysis and commentary on the launch on Tuesday at Computer Dealer News,
as well as the opportunity for the channel and managed service
providers. And follow our EMC tweet coverage by following us on
Twitter, at @CompDealerNews.
