EMC Atmos 2.1 Accelerates Cloud Value

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Object storage is certainly a hot topic, and it’s rising above it’s old data retention “jail” perception. And for good reasons. We think due to cloud storage building and adoption, increasingly mobile users and distributed apps, the benefits of active archiving and retaining ever bigger data sets that having a solid object storage strategy becomes significantly important going into 2013.

EMC is aiming to be a key part of that object strategy – today releasing Atmos 2.1 making wider adoption not only possible, but more profitable for both in-house cloud builders and service providers. There are some performance improvements under the hood (for larger file read/write), and significant increases in manageability intended to support ever larger deployments. But we think the cloud accelerators that enable better integration to organizational needs are going to provide the biggest bang. This latest version comes with expanded browser integration, an enhanced GeoDrive, more developer tools, and even some support for transitioning traditional apps to the cloud (bulk ingest, CAS metadata).  The theme is definitely to broaden the integration and hasten the adoption of cloud storage, gaining both cloud economics and enhanced productivity.

Atmos is already a great cloud object storage solution for web developers, but now also provides an API for Android, fast taking over the mobile marketplace. For developers in general, Atmos 2.1 can now provide anonymous URLs, which means those developers can easily build one time upload/download features into their apps (this is key for many collaboration use cases –  picture or image uploads, external file sharing, content distribution and other schemes).  Atmos 2.1 also supports “named objects”, which may ease certain kinds of distributed development challenges.

GeoDrive, a free addon to licensed Atmos customers, provides a secure, cached, drag and drop cloud drive interface. GeoDrive really makes collaboration easy by eliminating the need to set up complicated shares or mount points.  Now with GeoDrive 1.1, there are a bunch of enhancements including built-in data encryption and a CIFS Cloud Gateway so you don’t always need client side software. Shareable URL’s bring more collaboration into the picture to improve the private “dropbox” use case.  And collaboration is truly going global with GeoDrive now available in 10 languages (Atmos itself is already highly suited for distributed global cloud storage).

Perhaps most important is the new Native (Amazon) S3 API support.  By enabling customers to migrate S3 apps to Atmos (and vice-versa), Atmos cloud providers can now offer hybrid and mixed solutions alternatives, without threatening vendor lock-in.  Enterprises holding back because of fears of vendor lock-in (or that were tied into S3) can now consider the various SLA’s, services, and price options presented by Atmos powered options.

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