Last week, EMC offered a glimpse of its cloud storage roadmap when it announced VMAX SP for the cloud services provider market. That plan comes into sharper focus today with updates to the Atmos cloud storage platform.

During the EMC World conference in Las Vegas, the company is previewing Atmos upgrades designed to make it easier to store and manage hybrid cloud storage infrastructures. Available during the second quarter, the upgrades fit squarely into the bigger, better and faster philosophy that governs the breakneck pace of the cloud storage market.

According to EMC, storage administrators will be able to manage a 100 PB cloud across several sites as a single system. Large object handling is improved thanks to networking tweaks that deliver over a 50 percent performance increase according to EMC. Atmos is also capable of 90 percent faster, non-disruptive node upgrades — a nod to downtime-averse cloud providers.

Another theme is improved visibility. The new monitoring capabilities available via Atmos Event Manager provide system, data center and node level alerting and logging that is a 3x improvement over the previous offering. In addition to near real-time performance dashboards, administrators will have access to views segmented by year, week and hour.

All those upgrades are for naught if customers are having a tough time getting content onto the cloud. EMC addresses this challenge with new Atmos Cloud Accelerators, including new open source migration tool called AtmosSync that enables file system content migration to the cloud. Centera metadata support allows compatible apps to access, manage and store data on an Atmos cloud.

New capacity management APIs enable quota-based functionality. Additional Atmos API updates include setting the identifier for an Atmos object and secure single-use access for anonymous users. On the mobile front, the Atmos SDK now supports Google Android. EMC is also taking the opportunity to strengthen its Web access tools with support for HTML5 and Google Chrome.

VPLEX Beefs up for Hybrid Clouds

Further proof of EMC’s hybrid cloud storage ambitions comes in the form of new high availability and data protection for its virtual storage platform, VPLEX.

While the workloads may be virtual, a cloud is ultimately judged by real world performance. EMC said it has been able to squeeze out 40 percent more performance and a 2x improvement in scalability, enabling organizations to support up to 1,600 host initiators per VPLEX configuration.

VPLEX now integrates with VMware APIs for vSphere Storage Awareness (VASA) and Array Integration (VAAI), consolidating management of both virtual server and storage into the vSphere console. EMC VPLEX METRO is also now certified for Oracle Real Application Clusters a stretch cluster configuration.

EMC is also touting new RecoverPoint and VPLEX integration as the industry’s first “high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments.” It’s a combo the company says can help businesses get their clouds back up and running with ordered disaster recovery and virtual machine restarts over both VPLEX Local and Metro environments.

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