Today EMC Corporation announced an expansion of its EMC Atmos cloud partner ecosystem to help customers manage and optimize external clouds as part of an overall private cloud strategy.
RainStor (my current company) participated in the early evaluation and feedback of the Atmos platform. Our close partnership with EMC has ensured that our ISV partners, who embed RainStor as part of their overall solution, immediately gain the ability to leverage Atmos as their platform of choice with little or no effort on their part. As Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing CTO eloquently articulated in today’s blog post Building The Atmos Storage Ecosystem Atmos is “… designed to deliver services, rather than simply storage. And if you’re a hardware type, you’re frustrated that the hardware of Atmos is relatively uninteresting—almost all of the value comes from software.”
This philosophy is what makes the EMC Atmos and RainStor a perfect combination to preserve and make online retrievable large amounts of historical data for regulatory or business purposes. With RainStor’s specialized repository integrated, ISV partners can deliver enterprise-ready cloud services utilizing powerful Atmos built-in features such as policy-based management and GeoProtect.
All this is good technical stuff, but the real silver-lining that makes Atmos and other cloud platforms so compelling is the promise of significant cost-efficiencies as well as new revenue generating opportunities as “big data” growth continues unabated. As indicated in EMC’s Atmos press release:
“According to the new EMC-sponsored IDC study titled The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?, in 2009, amid the “Great Recession,” the amount of digital information grew 62% over 2008 to 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 Zettabytes). One Zettabyte equals one trillion gigabytes. In addition, based on the use of cloud computing services by companies to reduce the portion of their IT budget devoted to legacy system maintenance, IDC estimates that the increase in IT dollars spent on innovation could drive more than $1 trillion in increased business revenues between now and the end of 2014. This projection will increase substantially as private cloud and other cloud computing models move into mainstream adoption.”
If you are an ISV, reseller, managed service provider or SaaS application vendor, you may already be encountering such “opportunities” in the form of increased data growth and usage by your customers, coupled with a new tide of regulatory and compliance mandates across industries and sectors which require that historical data be maintained and made available online accessible for longer periods.
Does cloud computing and the Atmos platform provide you with the best way to monetize? Or should you be also thinking beyond traditional RDBMS’ such as Oracle and MySQL and focusing on new technologies that are optimized for longer term retention and retrieval of big data.
If you have filed cloud computing under your longer term plans, the “opportunities” can still be exploited through traditional on-premise environments and cost-efficient low cost hardware (EMC being a prime example of course). Rather than just being swept up by the crowds for clouds, you can stand out by thinking differently and considering technology alternatives that not only meet your needs today, but are future proofed for an evolutionary move to the cloud.