EMC on Monday announced its first cloud-infrastructure offering. Dubbed EMC Atmos, the offering is a multi-petabyte information-management solution that aims to help customers automatically manage and optimize the distribution of rich, unstructured information across global, cloud-storage environments.
As EMC describes it, Atmos makes a way for Web 2.0 and Internet providers, telecommunications, media and entertainment companies to securely build and deliver cloud-based information-centric services and applications on a massive scale by providing the capabilities of centralized management and automated information placement on a global scale.
Combined with the growth of user-generated content on the Web, Web 2.0 applications, including video and photo-sharing services, are creating billions of new documents, videos, digital images and music. The need to serve that content to hundreds of locations and millions of users around the world demands global-scale information management. Enter cloud optimized storage (COS), a term used to describe current and future global-scale information-management architectures.
Witness a Revolution
“The explosive growth of user-generated content is driving the need for an information infrastructure solution that can efficiently and effectively manage petabytes of information,” said Mike Feinberg, senior vice president of EMC’s cloud infrastructure group. “We are witnessing a revolution in the way large customers manage their information globally and deliver new cloud-based services to market.”
Analyst Benjamin Woo of IDC agreed with Feinberg’s assessment. The cloud-computing model, he said, helps companies capitalize on the rapid growth and increasing value of unstructured digital assets by providing an efficient infrastructure that leverages many highly distributed resource acting as a single, local entity.
“A new class of information infrastructure, like EMC Atmos, is therefore required to help expose the business potential that can be gained from information mobility through an ‘any-to-any’ architecture,” Woo said. “Organizations that leverage this architecture with a highly flexible and granular policy engine will gain a significant competitive advantage.”
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