What's that up in the Cloud? It's better infrastructure by EMC Atmos

by Cary J. Calderone

In a follow up to a few other posts on Cloud computing I am happy to report that EMC has been focusing on improving your Cloud experience. Their latest Atmos Cloud Delivery product line will enable Cloud providers to meter and provision Cloud usage. How does this help you in your DRED work?  As mentioned in my previous Cloud articles, Cloud providers, even the biggest names, have had a difficult time avoiding bottlenecks and slowdowns as Cloud usage grows. (What's that up in the Cloud?) They have not been able to adequately anticipate or control how and when some users will over-burden their equipment and cause a slowdown for all their Cloud users. If Atmos works as advertised, it will go a long way towards eliminating one of the biggest concerns companies face when considering a move to the Cloud; "will it work fast when we need it to work?"
Up until now, the Cloud providers have not been able to sufficiently monitor (and report) usage and data flow statistics. So they were faced with the very challenging task of trying to persuade a company to move to the Cloud while they could not actually show that availability and throughput would not be a recurring issue. Now with better monitoring and provisioning tools available, Cloud providers should be able to offer better availability and more reliability to their new and existing Cloud customers. Readers of this blog may ask, "who is EMC?"  Well, EMC is the largest providers of data storage technology and I would put in the category of a company like Cisco Systems. Even if you have not ever heard of them, if you use a phone or computer on the internet, then you use EMC products.  This is good news for the evolution of the Cloud.