In 1969 during the original Star Trek TV show, The Cloud Minders episode featured Statos, a city in the clouds. Today, EMC launches Atmos, cloud optimized storage. This is not science fiction, but the realization of much work on managing very large amounts of data “in the cloud.” Having been in the hands of customers since early Summer, this offering is intended to manage massive amounts of Internet-based information. How massive? Petabytes to begin with.
Forecast: Cloudy?
“Cloud computing” is a very popular topic right now, and there is often more heat than light shed on the subject. EMC releases Atmos at a time when many others are still debating over cloud computing and arguing whether it is or is not grid computing, software as a service, outsourcing, or Web 2.0-based data.
The Atmos sphere

What does Atmos encompass? First, it is different than simply block-based Storage Area Networks (SAN), file-based Network Accessed Storage (NAS), or even object-based Content Addressed Storage (CAS). EMC introduced CAS in the Spring of 2002 with the launch of Centera, part of an object-based archiving and compliance solution. As revolutionary as this was half a decade ago, so too is COS today.
- Massive Scalability
Global manageability through a namespace, regardless of geographical location. Multi-tenancy means that different tenants could store their unique information objects in their own private namespace under the Atmos namespace.
- Policy Based Information Management
Information can be managed by policy, and automatically acted upon by business rules for the metadata that defines the policy. For example, if an object conforms to a policy of “popular”, it could be replicated appropriately to deliver better service levels to users. When demand drops off and it becomes less “popular” the number of copies could be automatically pruned.
- Operational Efficiency
Whether it’s a drive, server, or network — all of this can be seen and managed from a single console.

There are many excellent articles available already that explain this in greater detail. Check out Chuck Hollis at Chuck’s Blog, Mark Twomey at Storagezilla, Steve Todd at Information Playground, Dave Spencer at Dave Talks Shop, Dave Graham at Dave Graham’s Weblog, and Len Devanna’s summary.
Thanks for coming along.










Why Info Exponential? Because information is growing faster right now than it ever has in history.


Eagle Eye is a dramatic techno-thriller that opened in late September as a standard film as well as an IMAX movie. And, as the subject of the movie is concerned with mobile devices, there is a mobile version of the Eagle Eye: the Mobile Game available on a variety of BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Java powered devices.
VMWORLD 2008: A VERITABLE VERDANT VENTURE
In the VMware Store on premise, there is a Timpuk2 messenger bag for sale. It’s a special limited edition of 75, made from the recycled banners from last year’s VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, available in blue, black, orange and green. The beanies are made from recycled cotton, and the polo shirts from recycled polyester. No new polyesters need give their life to make a new polo shirt.
VMWORLD 2008: DAY 1 KEYNOTE
So, what’s the new “platform”? Paul explained the Virtual Datacenter OS, or VDC-OS. It is a way to support a variety of current popular “platforms” line .Net, Windows, Linux, Java, Software As A Service… with Application vServices that provide Availability, Security, and Scalability. This rests upon Infrastructure vServices called vCompute, vStorage, and vNetwork… as well as Cloud vServices. These in turn live on either the On-premise cloud, or an Off-premise Cloud (for additional resources.) Meanwhile, all of this can be managed by vCenter (the rebranded Virtual Center management framework) which handles both Application Management at the top end and Infrastructure Management at the backend.
VMWORLD IN VEGAS