• Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?

EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?

November 10, 2008 By Stephen 14 Comments

As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management?

Great! But I thought the new era for IT was a cloud with choice, mobility, and application support, as trumpeted by EMC’s VMware subsidiary! Wasn’t Cloud vServices from VDC-OS supposed to be the prototype cloud strategy for the datacenter?

What we have here is a simple clash of marketing amusingly taking place at (nearly) the same company. VMware figured out how to extend their server virtualization products outside the confines of the data center, and laid that technology out as a strategy with the trendy “cloud” name. Meanwhile, mother EMC is working on next-generation content storage software and decides to roll that out as a strategy and also jumps on the “cloud” meme. What’s an IT manager to do?

Defining Atmos

As predicted, EMC’s Atmos (code-name Maui) is a distributed software layer to handle the storage and management of data objects across geographically-dispersed storage devices. EMC’s Chuck Hollis demonstrates Atmos with a simple, practical example, perhaps making it sound too much like Akamai but generally getting the point across. You have a data object, write it to Atmos through REST/SOAP or CIFS/NFS, assign some metadata, and the software takes care of data placement for you. It’ll add local copies, replicate for availability and performance, compress or deduplicate, manage versions, and all sorts of goodies (if you ask it to).

But EMC already has a capable object storage platform, the Centera. We’ve just got used to the content-addressable storage (CAS) label for object storage (even though this name misses the point of object storage, in my opinion) and now EMC wants us to learn a new label for a somewhat-similar device? Steve Todd, EMC’s object guy extraordinaire, lays it out:

SAN Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for blocks.

NAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for files.

CAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for objects (content + metadata).

COS Value = Globalized, secure multi-tenancy for content with rich policies.

Ok, so the defining capabilities of Atmos are its global scale and rich policies. And the fact that “objects” has become “content”, presumably since Atmos can handle traditional NAS (CIFS/NFS) chores as well.

Prayers Answered?

It sounds like EMC is answering my prayers for a storage revolution, delivering a highly-capable object storage platform that transcends the old limits of blocks, directories, and files. Steve Todd points out that Atmos handles five policy categories out of the box:

  • Replication
  • Compression
  • Spin-down
  • Object de-dup
  • Versioning

So we write some data to Atmos, using either traditional NAS or webby dubby protocols like SOAP, and can then apply policies in any of these five categories to that data. One can also extend the Atmos to accept other policies, but the absence (out of the box) of concepts like encryption, secure deletion, retention, and access control are surprising.

I am quite puzzled about how practical these policy capabilities will be in the real world. How exactly would an application say “I want you to compress that file I wrote over NFS just now?” Hitachi’s HCAP platform, for example, also has policy capabilities and a NAS front end, and although archiving applications can communicate their policy needs, I don’t see lots of current general-purpose applications using it.

Strategic Storage?

This brings me to my puzzlement: The default Atmos policies are all general-purpose, production computing ideas, not the special-purpose, archiving and retention needs served by Centera, HCAP, and the rest. So the Atmos is clearly intended to be a production data storage system, not an archiving system to compete with Centera.

Since mainstream business applications currently don’t have any capability to specify policies like these when writing files, and since NAS protocols lack any means to communicate them even if the apps want to, we can conclude that EMC expects that Atmos users will write special applications to take advantage of it.

EMC certainly doesn’t expect that the NAS-capable Atmos will simply replace today’s distributed NAS solutions. NAS is a sideshow for Atmos. The real action will be in the REST/SOAP webby dubby applications that will be written with the platform in mind and will take full advantage of these capabilities.

If this is true, and I and others suspect that it is, then Atmos really isn’t a game-changing platform unless you change your game. If you write new applications to store data with SOAP, Atmos is a nice in-house alternative to Amazon S3 or Nirvanix, and offers a very compelling set of data management capabilities. And if you want to set up shop to compete with those service providers, Atmos is a dream come true with built-in multi-tenancy.

Datacenter Strategy

So EMC alone has two seemingly competitive datacenter strategies. And then there’s Microsoft, which announced its Azure cloud platform recently, and Amazon and the other cloud providers.

So let’s say you’re a CIO for a large corporation. Which of the following strategies is more compelling:

  1. Use VMware VDC-OS to add capabilities and Cloud vServices extend your current virtual infrastructure geographically
  2. Recompile and tweak your Windows applications to leverage Microsoft Azure
  3. Develop new applications to take advantage of the impressive storage capabilities of an in-house EMC Atmos system
  4. Point your new applications at a third-party cloud provider like Amazon or Nirvanix

IT people are practical. Although we love new technology, we tend to be cautious. We also hate massive software development efforts, and only sanction them when they’re absolutely necessary. Given these personality traits, I’d say VDC-OS and perhaps Cloud vServices still stands out as the most likely and practical scenario for the majority of applications and businesses.

This is not to say that EMC Atmos will be a flop. I’m impressed by the technology, and expect that Atmos will find buyers, just as Centera did. And Atmos might even replace Centera once EMC adds retention policies to it and scales it down as well as up and out. But Atmos will not redefine the datacenter. We’re stuck with blocks and files, and VMware’s practical strategy is a winner in that world.

Update: Marc Farley compares Atmos to WAFS, with ominous implications, and echos my recent question on what is and is not innovative.

Update 2: Chuck Hollis, Storagezilla, and Len Devanna have all come right out and said that this is only intended for certain customers with massive distributed storage needs, and is not intended as a new datacenter strategy. Even the “cloudfella” says “ciao”:

Update 3: More great information, including a reply regarding VDC-OS and Atmos from the one and only Chad Sakac, more great detail about the inner workings of Atmos from Steve Todd, and even more info from Dave Graham. Finally, although I think that Cloudfellas video is cute, I wouldn’t categorize it as viral. But those Mozy ads are awesome!

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Storage is Getting Cloudier!
  • Waves of Storage Innovation
  • Apple Packs PCIe SSD Alongside PC-Fast CPU and…
  • macOS Sierra Includes a New Apple File System, APFS
  • Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Amazon, Atmos, Azure, CAS, Centera, Chuck Hollis, CIFS, cloud, cloud storage, Cloud vServices, compression, COS, deduplication, EMC, HCAP, Hitachi, Maui, Microsoft, NAS, nas storage, network attached storage, network storage, NFS, Nirvanix, replication, REST, SOAP, Steve Todd, VDC-OS, VMware

An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.

Jef Raskin

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive

December 11, 2017

How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud

How To Remove Raw Images From Apple Photos and iCloud

July 24, 2017

Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty

Recalling An HP MediaSmart Server To Active Duty

July 21, 2017

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

July 19, 2017

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

July 10, 2017

Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

June 26, 2017

What is OCuLink?

What is OCuLink?

June 22, 2017

Storage is Getting Cloudier!

Storage is Getting Cloudier!

June 21, 2017

Where Have All The GPU’s Gone? Cryptocurrency Mining!

Where Have All The GPU’s Gone? Cryptocurrency Mining!

June 11, 2017

Turn Off Error Recovery in RAID Drives: TLER, ERC, and CCTL

Turn Off Error Recovery in RAID Drives: TLER, ERC, and CCTL

May 30, 2017

Symbolic Links

  • Cisco’s Latest AP is Mind-Blowing (and a quick history lesson)

  • E8 Storage Announces InfiniBand Support

  • Wireless Controller Extinction?

  • Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes

  • Do We Need Regulations For IoT Security?

Featured Posts

FCoE vs. iSCSI – Making the Choice

May 20, 2011

Ten Terrible Apple Products

June 14, 2012

From LAN Manager and SMB to CIFS: The Evolution of Prehistoric PC Network Protocols

March 22, 2012

Microsoft’s Big Chance to Change

August 23, 2013

MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

December 20, 2012

Datacenter History: Through the Ages in Lego

October 22, 2013

Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

May 2, 2016

10 Mysteries The Lost Finale Definitively Settled

May 25, 2010

Rocking Out With the Topping VX1 Desktop/Bookshelf Amplifier

October 6, 2015

Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5

July 16, 2011

Copyright © 2018 · Log in