Billed by the vendor as a "Cloud Optimized Storage" (COS) platform, EMC's Atmos is targeted primarily to service providers or large, globally dispersed enterprises and provides for them a TCP/IP-based storage infrastructure especially suited to the automated dispersion and management of large unstructured files such as audio or video. With Atmos, multiple storage racks can be deployed in disparate global locations, and all managed as a single entity under a single namespace. The platform can theoretically scale infinitely within the namespace by adding/connecting hardware.

The file objects stored in the Atmos infrastructure support customizable metadata tagging; i.e., each object can have its own set of metadata attributes. This key feature of the product is leveraged by other platform functions; most noticeably the automated and policy-based data movement capabilities that enable the creation and implementation of policies that govern where individual objects should be located, in what quantities (i.e., how many copies), and for how long. By associating these policies with metadata tags, information can be geographically dispersed by Atmos automatically as the result of an attribute change to a file's metadata. In addition to this automated file movement, metadata can also be leveraged by a number of additional capabilities of the platform, including replication, versioning, compression, and de-duplication; all of which are built-in to Atmos and do not require additional components.

Access to the data stored on Atmos is via either Web-based APIs (SOAP or REST), facilitating integration of the storage with Web-based applications; or through network file access protocols including CIFS, NFS, and IFS. An additional feature--multi-tenancy--allows multiple applications to share the global namespace while simultaneously keeping their data separate, one from another. Overall management of the platform is via browser-based tools.

Though essentially a software offering, Atmos is initially offered by EMC in three pre-configured hardware platforms: The WS1-120 and WS1-240, both of which are optimized for performance (including an equal number of servers and disk enclosures, and supporting 120 and 240 TB of capacity, respectively); and the WS1-360, which is optimized for capacity with 6 servers and 24 disk enclosures (total capacity of 360 TB). The products are served in 40 or 44U racks; include 120, 240, or 360 1 TB SATA II drives; leverage SAS 4 lane connectors between the drives and servers themselves; are accessed via Gig Ethernet (10 Gig optional in the 240 and 360 models); and ship with a basic one-year warranty.

EMC Atmos is available now. Contact EMC for further information.