Cloud storage products officially coming to Earth

EMC Corporation today released its long advertised cloud storage infrastructure solution, an already-known system that incorporates common hardware on the market, and EMC says the Atmos platform for automated configuration and self-healing can be scaled to petabytes, Incorporating service providers and IT departments to provide different levels of storage services.

Now, using the Internet or "cloud" to store is a very attractive thing, he can eliminate all kinds of unnecessary trouble, such as purchasing management software and hardware systems to ensure the ability to meet the growing storage requirements, making it easier to online backup and disaster recovery.

However, cloud storage is not simple, and now available cloud storage services, such as Amazon's S3 and Google's services, are fairly basic. After two years of development, EMC has unveiled its software/hardware portfolio called Atmos-a product that was once referred to as "Maui and Hulk" (for details, see Dostor's exclusive article shortly before: An exclusive disclosure of EMC research programs: The Maui of Globalization and Exclusive disclosure of EMC Research program: Hulk detailed configuration) "

As we have described earlier, the well-known Maui and Hulk are software and hardware systems designed to provide a global, large-scale storage infrastructure. EMC has designed a new storage product category for its new storage, the cloud optimized storage (cloud-optimized storage), the Cos.

EMC Company Introduction says Atmos can be configured, self-healing, and serviced in a cloud-storage way, designed to help telecom companies, Internet service providers, and large enterprises build external cloud storage services or build internal storage clouds within the enterprise based on the concept of cloud storage, which can scale to petabytes, Supports billions of of files and objects, and provides the ability to access around the world.

Atmos uses a policy-based management system that provides the ability to build different types of cloud storage, for example, it can create two copies of files for non-paying users, store them in different locations around the world, and create 5~10 backups for paid users to store. and provides greater reliability and faster access to files throughout the world. In software systems, Atmos includes data services, such as replication, data compression, and data de-duplication, to obtain hundreds of TB of hard disk storage space through inexpensive standard x86 servers. EMC promises that it has the ability to automatically configure new storage space and adapt to hardware failures. Also allows users to manage and read using Web service protocols.

EMC Corporation believes that the key point is that Atmos has the ability to simplify storage management, enabling service providers and IT departments to provide a wide range of cloud storage services, a large number of customers in a multiuser architecture, without requiring a large team of system administrators to manually manage the system, EMC Corporation claims that it will be able to manage several petabytes of data early on.

"We designed it for efficiency and scale," he said. "This allows users to add hundreds of TB of space, and all he buys is to plug it into the network and declare it in an existing ATMOS system, which will automatically be added to the namespace," said Jon Martin, director of product management at EMC's cloud infrastructure division. The old way of doing things is no longer important. ”

Martin says Atmos is "fundamentally different" from existing storage-system software, because most of its management and key functions are built into the storage system, rather than appearing outside.

"It includes all the services, replication, versioning, compression, data de-duplication, spin down, all controlled by strategy, and we've been able to provide a very pleasant surprise that users can manage on an object-oriented basis." Martin says this allows service providers or IT departments to use a single large infrastructure to support different storage strategies and applications for different tenants, "which allows you to use fewer people for management." "he said.

EMC offers three different configurations for Atmos, all based on x86 servers and supports gigabit or 10GbE Ethernet connectivity, 120TB, 240TB, and 360tb,martin, respectively. We run 15 1TB drives in a 3U rack, You can disassemble any part without using a screwdriver. ”

Analysts Taneja Group, analyst Taneja Group, called Atmos the "game-changing player", especially for the regional service providers that want to provide storage services, "EMC brings a sophisticated policy engine, It provides data storage optimization and enables files to be stored in the cloud. ”

Jeff Boles believes that Atmos has "let's look at our storage in a new way-how we store, interact, and use file data," he says, which he believes will have a huge impact on existing industries over the next few years.

Benjamin Woo, as the vice president of the Enterprise Storage Research Division of IDC, the analyst, called Atmos "an important step forward." "Because it takes data as objects, not just files." "You can derive more value from the scope of a tagged file or an object that is extensible metadata." You can do many different types of searches to find objects. ”

The new software, he argues, is helping EMC to change its hardware-focused image, "a revolutionary rather than a simple evolution that will give users a different way of applying for processing data objects." "IDC predicts that sales of this type of storage system will increase by one times a year and will have an important market share by 2012."

Boles and Woo believe EMC should first call on server providers, such as Internet access providers, telecoms companies, Web2.0 businesses, media and entertainment companies. However, they predict that over time, the enterprise IT department will also start to consider using such platforms to provide storage services, as introduced by EMC.

When a file or object is stored in the Atmos system, the policy engine marks the data and confirms how many copies should be made, and where it should be stored, Martin says, "You can adjust the system to maximize performance or reliability, as well as duplicate scores, Where they can store the specified user and what type of service will be applied. ”

For the IT department, security issues are a challenge to storage services, and many enterprise IT departments are not comfortable letting others deal with their key business information, Boles, "We need some time to learn how to manage the security cloud." "In the long run, cloud architecture provides exceptional security," and cloud storage can provide a strong security infrastructure and a larger scale than your own architecture. "This is a realistic expectation that firewalls, ratings, and data loss prevention tools will be available on cloud storage, although we do not yet have it," Boles said. ”

IDC is obviously more interested in object storage, it argues that object-based storage allows IT managers to "ignore 0 and 1" and focus their attention on building a service model that focuses on adding value-added services rather than infrastructure, and IDC believes this may be open-ended and we are just beginning to build on zero.