EMC expands Atmos for cloud service providers
Storage company EMC has released an add-on for its Atmos cloud storage offering that makes it easy for customers to add cloud storage to their services.
The EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform (ACDP), announced on Tuesday, adds a host of modules that will allow Atmos customers to turn the storage product into a storage-as-a-service platform without having to write their own metering, management, utilisation and billing modules.
ACDP can be used by Atmos customers to offer cloud archiving, backup, collaboration and other storage-as-a-service solutions to customers. By using ACDP, says EMC, Atmos customers will be able to cut the time it takes them to deploy cloud services via Atmos from months to "a matter of days".
"Practically speaking, every organisation is a service provider and whether they deliver that over the public cloud or over the private cloud their customers are demanding that experience; that notion of self-service, of continuous access, of understanding what's happening from a capacity utilisation and a cost perspective, so we're enabling enterprise customers to be much more proactive and capable of delivering that experience to their customers [via ACDP]", said senior EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group vice president Mike Feinberg in an EMC video, released alongside the announcement.
The ACDP uses a blend of object metadata and a distributed global hardware infrastructure to serve data locally with global optimisation. Atmos also contains policy management for selecting how objects can be provisioned and how they can react to demand.
Atmos is designed to cope with the problems inherent in scaling up storage infrastructures for worldwide demand, according to EMC. For example, if a company has a global storage infrastructure that is hooked into Atmos, then if it sees a huge spike in demand from one specific area in the world, Atmos will be able to shift the demanded data to hardware that's close to the site of local demand by making temporary copies of the desired data. This should reduce latency and place less strain on the overall network.
On Tuesday, EMC also announced expanded multi-tenancy capabilities for Atmos. Atmos currently separates the data and administration of individual cloud services (tenants) and subsidiary services (sub-tenants), but Atmos now offers "network separation of tenants", which EMC says "improves security and operation efficiencies for service providers and enterprises supporting multiple applications, departments and customers in a single, shared cloud infrastructure".
ACDP and the Atmos enhancements were made available worldwide on Tuesday. Pricing was not disclosed.
EMC partner MTI will use ACDP to offer on-premise and off-premise storage services, according to EMC.