EMC brings Atmos storage to Linux

Linux workstations have gained the ability to plug directly into an EMC Atmos cloud via a Dropbox-like application.

The changes to Atmos, launched by EMC on Monday, see the storage company broaden the ways people can access and manage the Cloud Delivery Platform layer of the infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud product.

"We've seen tremendous traction and interest from both service providers and enterprises looking to deploy public and private-cloud storage offerings, and both have benefited greatly from the new advancements built into the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform," Mike Feinberg, general manager of EMC's cloud infrastructure group, said in a statement.

Atmos is EMC's very expensive and very large cloud storage platform. It can be run either from a dedicated hardware appliance or as software in a virtual environment, or both. It is designed to manage petascale and exascale datasets with billions of objects and to operate across multiple geographies as a shared storage environment.

EMC made additions on two fronts. The first makes its Atmos GeoDrive service compatible with Red Hat or Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Linux operating systems, giving people the ability to access an Atmos-shared cloud storage folder from their desktop. The second brings a host of new management and automation features to the Cloud Delivery Platform software, a key component of Atmos.

The changes to the Cloud Delivery Platform allow administrators to measure and set limits on the bandwidth for each user accessing the Atmos infrastructure, and integrate chargeback and billing. It is packaged as a VMWare vApp and can be placed on top of an Atmos system to deliver a storage-as-a-service infrastructure "with a few clicks of the mouse", EMC said.

Cloud Delivery Platform also gained an administrator portal to let people check lifecycle management, monitor users, respond to capacity requests and tweak account settings.

Pricing was not disclosed for the updated software.