Cloud based data management

Cloud storage booster EMC has canned its own Atmos Online cloud storage service, referring customers to its three "world-class service providers".

EMC launched the Atmos Online service in May, 2009. Fourteen months later this has been downgraded to a development resource.

We are no longer planning to support production usage of Atmos Online.  Going forward, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by our continuously expanding range of Service Provider partners who offer production services. We will no longer be offering paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services. Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage. We will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment. As a result, we strongly encourage that you migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to one of our partners offering Atmos-based services.  An updated list of partners is available here.

There are just three partners offering Atmos-based services: AT&T, Hosted Solutions and Peer 1 Hosting.

EMC blogger Chad Sakac wrote on 3 June:

EMC Atmos Online Storage Service is also up and running. EMC’s own service based on the technology is there not because we want to be a service provider, but because it represents a real, living proof point. Also, you can’t really claim to understand cloud storage models unless you have services up and running – it’s how we learn and continue to improve the product that we sell to service providers. You can sign up with a credit card for EMC Atmos Online Storage Services below (2 months free!).

Not any more, you can't. Presumably EMC is going to have to "learn and continue to improve the product" some other way.

One possible conclusion is that the costs of running the service far outweighed the revenue from customers. Another is that the spectre of channel conflict was present, with EMC's Atmos partners unhappy that EMC was competing with them. A third possibility is that customers in general are not rushing to use cloud storage services. ®

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