Storagezilla

PCM Vs Flash

Interesting demo of Phase Change Memory Vs Flash. Still well in the development stage but you can see the promise.

Atmos: Object storage is only the start.

I’ll admit to not being that interested in the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform up until quite recently.

To me all the action was in the policy driven Petabyte scale multi-tenant distributed storage system. Looked at that, seen it advanced beyond release and I then went off to look at something else. But thinking back on it in totality I found myself asking how do you make that what it needs to be?

How do you make it ubiquitous & invisible? Storage, delivered to end users and metered the same way as water, natural gas or electricity?

Well that’s what the Cloud Delivery Platform does for Atmos.

It provides self service access & storage management of a multi-tenant environment which can be metered on things like utilization or bandwidth, with the ability to integrate into billing systems. And on top of that it’s white label, meaning you can get in there modify and re-skin the entire user experience to ensure continuity with any other services you’re providing to your users.

When you consider that to date all of the functionality in the above paragraph tended to be one shot custom development jobs, where you’d back a truck full of money into your object storage vendors driveway and they’d put a team of their people on it for whatever amount of time it took to get it right, this is a significant step forward. And it’s deployed as a VMware vApp.

Indeed there are some  Atmos customers who’ve deployed the entire shooting match as a vApp, switched on storage as a service with self service access, metering, billing & management in an afternoon on top of vSphere and then went home for the night.

Moving away from the universe of tenants and sub-tenants and focusing on Application Developers for a moment, there are monthly developer workshops running where developers can learn about the system and stand up their own applications enabled for Atmos in an EMC Development Cloud.

Developers want code, not trips to the Airport to go sit in a class room. Do it all online with other developers.

What about users?

I signed up with Oxygen Cloud recently and found it pretty useful for Sync & Share.

I’m using EMC’s Atmos deployment and Oxygen Cloud across my PCs, iPad and Android phone, with the collaboration options Oxygen Cloud allows for files enabled, so I can work with a distributed team.

With the amount I read and the feedback I give It’s better than email attachments, trust me.

 

All in, I had Atmos ass backwards for a while now. I thought the most interesting part was the storage system itself, when all the action was really in self service, was in the ease of application enablement and was in what third parties have been building using both of those.

A bigger picture for a bigger distributed storage system.

EMC & F5: Deduplication Storage In A Tiered Storage Environment

Seamlessly Integrating Deduplication Storage into a Tiered Storage Environment

By seamlessly integrating deduplication storage into a tiered storage environment, you can reduce the complexity of data management while driving down capital and operational expenses significantly.

Join F5 and EMC and learn how you can reduce the cost and complexity of managing unstructured data. 

via resources.f5.com

I might give this a look myself to find out what's new with F5 & Data Domain.

Drought.

First it was the point of sale price hikes, then today I was browsing around a major high street retail computer store when I spotted this printed out and scattered amongst the computers and external storage devices.

A visit to two competing retailers across the city confirmed a shortage of external hard drives with only the higher end Media & Home NAS devices on the shelves. When I asked retail assistants if they were due to receive any new stock soon one told me they were informed by their parent company that any deliveries before the end of the year should be considered a stroke of good luck.

Iomega TV about to ship. (Finally)

Someone sharpen my ice skates, hell has frozen over and I’m told the Iomega TV with Boxee devices are one step closer to European retailers.

They’re not for sale in stores yet but they’ve gone up on European retailers websites and Amazon.co.uk lists the 25th of November as the order fulfilment date.

I’ve been waiting Eleven months for this, I can wait a few more days.