Tsahy Shapsa of aprigo organized the second Boston Cloud Services meetup yesterday. There were two very informative presentations, the first by Riki Fine of EMC on the EMC Atmos project and the second by Craig Halliwell from TwinStrata.
What I learnt was that Atmos was EMC’s entry into the cloud arena. The initial product was a cloud storage offering with some additional functionality over other offerings like Amazon’s. Key product attributes appear to be scalability into the petabytes, policy and object metadata based management, multiple access methods (CIFS/NFS/REST/SOAP), and a common “unified namespace” for the entire managed storage. While the initial offering was for a cloud storage offering, there was a mention of a compute offering in the not too distant future.
In terms of delivery, EMC has setup its own data centers to host some of the Atmos clients. But, they have also partnered with other vendors (AT&T was mentioned) who would provide an cloud storage offerings that exposed the Atmos API. AT&T’s web page reads
AT&T Synaptic Cloud Storage uses the EMC Atmos™ backend to deliver an enterprise-grade global distribution system. The EMC Atmos™ Web Services API is a Web service that allows developers to enable a customized commodity storage system over the Internet, VPNs, or private MPLS connectivity.
I read this as a departure from the approach being taken by the other vendors. I don’t believe that other offerings (Amazon, Azure, …) provide a standardized API and allow others to offer cloud services compliant to that interface. In effect, I see this as an opportunity to create a marketplace for “plug compatible” cloud storage. Assume that a half dozen more vendors begin to offer Atmos based cloud storage, each offering a different location, SLA’s and price point, an end user has the option to pick and choose from that set. To the best of my knowledge, today the best one can do is pick a vendor and then decide where in that vendor’s infrastructure the data would reside.
Atmos also seems to offer some cool resiliency and replication functionality. An application can leverage a collection of Atmos storage providers. Based on policy, an object could be replicated (synchronously or asynchronously) to multiple locations on an Atmos cloud with the options of having some objects only within the firewall and others being replicated outside the firewall.
Enter TwinStrata who are an Atmos partner. They have a cool iSCSI interface to the Atmos cloud storage. With a couple of clicks of a mouse, they demonstrated the creation of a small Atmos based iSCSI block device. Going over to a windows server machine and rescanning disks they found the newly created volume. A couple of clicks later there was a newly minted “T:” that the application could use, just as it would a piece of local storage. TwinStrata provides some additional caching and ease of use features. We saw the “ease of use” part yesterday. The demo lasted a couple of minutes and no more than about a dozen mouse clicks. The version that was demo’ed was the iSCSI interface, there was talk of a file system based interface in the near future.
Right now, all of these offerings are expected to be for Tier-3 storage. Over time, there is a belief that T2 and T1 will also use this kind of infrastructure.
Very cool stuff! If you are in the Boston area and are interested in the Cloud paradigm, definitely check out the next event on Sept 23rd.
Pizza and refreshments were provided by Intuit. If you haven’t noticed, the folks from Intuit are doing a magnificent job fostering these kinds of events all over the Boston Area. I have attended several excellent events that they have sponsored. A great big “Thank You” to them!
Finally, a big “Thank You” to Tsahy and Aprigo for arranging this meetup and offering their premises for the meetings.
Hype Cycles 