First EMC Cloud Infrastructure Offering: Atmos

EMC Corporation announced its first cloud infrastructure offering, EMC Atmos (codenamed Maui). EMC Atmos is the first multi-petabyte information management solution designed to help customers automatically manage and optimize the distribution of rich, unstructured information across global, cloud storage environments. Available today, EMC Atmos enables Web 2.0 and Internet providers, telecommunications, media and entertainment companies to securely build and deliver cloud-based information-centric services and applications at massive scale by providing the capabilities of centralized management and automated placement of information globally.

Content-rich Web 2.0 applications such as video and photo sharing services combined with the growth of user-generated content on the Web is creating billions of new objects in the form of documents, videos, digital images and music. This combination of massive growth, new information types, and the need to serve hundreds of locations and millions of users around the world has led to new market requirements for information management at a global scale. These market requirements have led to the rise of cloud optimized storage (COS), a term used to describe current and future global-scale information management architectures.

A key differentiator of EMC Atmos is the ability to define policies that determine how information is distributed and handled on a global basis. For example, information that is current and valuable may be defined as ‘premium’ and therefore require more copies in more locations than information that is older and accessed less frequently. The older information may be compressed and retained with fewer copies in fewer locations. Additional services such as compression and de-duplication are built into EMC Atmos, as are multi-tenant and Web service API features. For instance, a service provider using EMC Atmos can build applications that offer secure online services, ‘pay-for-use’ and other models. Additionally, media and entertainment companies can use these same features for global distribution, management and retention of digital media assets. EMC Atmos is providing these types of customers with low total cost of ownership — at petabyte scale — in a cloud environment, which is a compelling requirement and competitive advantage as they provide and deliver services to customers.

"In today’s world, individuals building on up to the largest organizations recognize the rapid growth and increasing value of unstructured digital assets ranging from digital photos to videos to mobile content of all sorts. To capitalize on this, the emerging cloud computing model provides organizations with an efficient infrastructure that leverages many highly distributed resources acting as a single, local entity," said Benjamin S. Woo, Vice President, Enterprise Storage Systems Research at IDC. "A new class of information infrastructure, like EMC Atmos, is therefore required to help expose the business potential that can be gained from information mobility through an ‘any to any’ architecture. Organizations that leverage this architecture with a highly flexible and granular policy engine will gain a significant competitive advantage."

EMC Atmos Features
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.
• 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.

A component of the EMC Atmos architecture is a low-cost, high-density storage system that offers ease of implementation and serviceability in an efficient footprint. This EMC-developed storage system is generally available today in 120TB, 240TB, and 360TB configurations. EMC Atmos software provides global information management across a flexible combination of these building block system configurations.

"As the world’s leading provider of enterprise-class storage and information management, EMC is uniquely qualified to deliver the building blocks that enable cloud infrastructures and a new generation of cloud-based services," said Mike Feinberg, Senior Vice President, EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group. "The explosive growth of user-generated content is driving the need for an information infrastructure solution that can efficiently and effectively manage petabytes of information. We are witnessing a revolution in the way large customers manage their information globally and deliver new cloud-based services to market."