Earlier this week, EMC announced an important new feature for Atmos: the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform that makes it far easier to create and deliver Atmos-based cloud storage services.
Unfortunately, I was locked away in a set of marathon planning meetings when the news hit, so I was unprepared for a blizzard of questions and interest.
Now that I've got a few moments, I thought I'd share my internal e-mail interview with Leo Leung, who does bizdev for Atmos here at EMC.
A Bit Of Background
If you enjoy seductively clever technology, it's worth understanding a bit about Atmos. Storage traditionalists frequently struggle to understand it, which makes it all the more interesting. I'll try and share the essence without too much detail.
In an Atmos environment (usually, multiple nodes separated by significant distance), storage is represented as objects with associated metadata. Applications create and use storage objects; policies around how the objects are treated (protection, performance, location, compliance, etc.) are driven entirely by metadata.
At its simplest, Atmos creates a storage cloud service, providing a wide variety of multitenant and geographically aware storage services using a simple, easy-to-administer management model.
Atmos itself is software -- it runs on a wide variety of storage hardware, including entirely in a virtual machine if needed. Atmos environments can get very big indeed: billions of objects, hundreds of nodes, etc.
Since Atmos targets a very specific audience (e.g. service providers, or enterprises needing to provide service-provider-like capabilities), it's not widely talked about in the press. That being said, the people who are using Atmos recognize that -- today -- there's nothing really like it in the market. And, yes, it's doing quite nicely in the market.
The announcement of ACDP (Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform) bridges the gap between product and delivering a service: it provides most of the glue needed to sign up customers, have them detail the services they'd like, provision those services, meter and support billing.
Some Additional Questions
While I was locked away in meetings, I gathered up some of the questions that were being sent in, and passed them along to Leo Leung. I've worked with Leo here at EMC for many years -- he's the sort of fun-yet-intense really smart person that's commonly found here at EMC.
Leo, at its essence, ACDP allows a service provider to quickly offer a complete “cloud storage” service — provisioning, metering, billing, customer mgmt, etc. Can you describe what you were seeing in the marketplace, and why EMC decided to build ACDP?
We saw a market full of telcos and managed hosters that wanted to expand their portfolio with a “cloud option”. There are an estimated 20,000 service providers worldwide, and none of them want to be sitting on the sidelines.
We also saw large enterprises that were frankly in shock at the bills they were getting from Amazon Web Services, understood the benefit of self-service over their traditional IT process, and realized that there was value to offering an internal alternative to their developers.
ACDP and Atmos offer the basics in an easily consumable package: provisioning, metering, user management, storage, with hooks for custom portals and billing systems.
When most people look at “storage as a service”, they’re usually thinking about rather basic commodity storage services. My impression, though, is that ACDP more frequently becomes a building block in a richer service. Can you comment?
Although ACDP certainly supports the basic storage service use case, customers are definitely looking more broadly to differentiate in the market. ACDP can support the metering of any Atmos-integrated application, which means it supports backup-as-a-service with EMC Networker, archiving-as-a-service with EMC FMA or content management with EMC Documentum or Microsoft SharePoint.
But why stop there? Any custom application that leverages Atmos can also be metered, so our customers are building desktop apps, mobile apps, consumer apps, all with the ability to be metered and fed into an aggregated bill.
Part of the announcement included some enhancements to the core Atmos platform, especially in the networking arena. Could you comment on some of those enhancements, and what customer and partner requirements drove those?
Some key enhancements were around network isolation and aggregation.
First, Atmos now supports VLAN tagging, which allows the customer to logically isolate administrative traffic from data traffic. VLAN tagging can also support logical network isolation of one tenant from another.
Second, Atmos supports channel bonding, essentially combining multiple network links into one to increase bandwidth. If you combine these new features with Atmos’ existing multi-tenancy features, which logically isolate multiple levels of users, you have an end-to-end story.
Our customers have told us loud and clear that they need flexibility in their deployments. Service Providers in particular do a lot in the network to manage and secure traffic, so we needed to support their capabilities. Other customers had specific performance requirements, so network aggregation enabled us to meet those requirements in a number of cases.
Is is better to think of ADCP as a closed platform, or more of a toolbox that could support a number of different use cases for service providers?
We absolutely think of ACDP as an open enabler. ACDP currently only supports Atmos and Atmos-integrated applications, but was built to be extensible to other types of services.
At a base level, as described earlier, it can already support a broad range of unstructured storage use cases, allowing service providers to differentiate their offerings based on different applications at different cost points with different levels of functionality.
Some customers are using Atmos and Atmos CDP for external offerings, as well as internal IT use cases. Other customers are experimenting with leveraging Atmos as a globally available persistence layer which acts as storage for a whole range of applications that need places to park content like log files, software builds, backups, etc.
Finally, multiple customers have taken advantage of our Atmos and ACDP APIs to plug them into their own management interfaces and portals.
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Thanks, Leo!
the best way to store data is through online storage mediums… there are many secure options out there!
Posted by: kyla22 | December 29, 2010 at 03:43 PM