EMC courts service providers with Atmos update

EMC plans to increase the performance of its Atmos multi-datacentre storage software as the company continues to court service providers.

The company gave details on the upcoming update at EMC World in Las Vegas on Monday. The new features are targeted at developers and aim to make it easier to control the software remotely and access it from a variety of devices and applications.

"With today's announcements, EMC demonstrates that the Atmos Cloud Platform can scale massively, while making it simple for our service provider and enterprise customers to manage their expanding cloud environments," Mike Feinberg, general manager of EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Group, said in a statement. "As service providers and enterprises scale their infrastructure to keep pace, they face numerous challenges in managing ever larger, globally distributed cloud environments."

Atmos is a private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform with an emphasis on storage rather than compute. More than 40 service providers, including AT&T and NaviSite, have built clouds on top of the technology.

OpenStack, the open-source cloud platform, competes with Atmos as a system for service providers wanting to run their own clouds. However, Atmos is a more mature platform than OpenStack, although it favours EMC's hardware and associated software products.

Atmos was first released in 2008 and has subsequently received several updates, all targeted at allowing its users to operate at larger and larger scales in a broader variety of software environments.

The technology saw a second major iteration at last year's EMC World, which emphasised cloud interoperability, the release of an SDK for Apple's iOS, and better integration with Centera applications.

Atmos updates

Monday's updates continue in the same vein, with broadened SDK support, enhanced APIs and a performance boost in the underlying software.

With today's announcements, EMC demonstrates that the Atmos Cloud Platform can scale massively.

– Mike Feinberg, EMC

Large objects can now be read and written 50-percent faster than in previous versions — due to networking enhancements, EMC said. Meanwhile, the company has created an Event Manager that gives administrators an overview of how their Atmos storage is performing, giving them visibility and logging at the system, datacentre and node (array) level.

The system for upgrading nodes has also been revamped, so updates can be carried out 90-percent faster, the company said.

Developers working with Atmos can now use an SDK to build Atmos applications for Android devices, and can use Google Chrome and HTML5 along with Firefox for web access. API tweaks let developers grant single-use access to the service to anonymous users, and allow them to manage capacities remotely.

Customers with Centera applications can move their metadata into an Atmos cloud and have the system manage it, while AtmosSync helps them migrate file system content into it.

The updates are expected to be available in the second half of 2012, EMC said in a statement.