StorageRap plays the Chuck Hollis Atmos guessing game

Chuck Hollis, the super-verbose blogger from EMC really outdid himself yesterday with his "guess what it could be" introduction to Atmos (the market hype formerly known as Maui).

Usually when a company announces a new product, people try to write about what it is and how customers would use it, but in this case the His Hollisness apparently had a senior moment and instead squeezed out a stream of consciousness on what it isn't. 

Yo Chuck, get an editor!  (But it would require hazardous duty pay)  I'll do you the favor,  Based on my reading today, I think you wanted to say something like this.

We have a new software product called Atmos, it works with the Hulk hardware platform which is  OTS PC server systems and SATA drives.  You can probably buy your own systems, but we're not sure how support is going to work if you do that. 

Atmos is accessed using web-access methods - such as browsers, applets and Javascript.  We've tried to make it as secure as possible, but its not the sort of storage product where you would put the corporate data jewels, if you know what I mean - things that might be considered "discoverable."

Atmos metadata is a key part of determining where data copies should be located inside a WAN. Atmos' policy engine monitors data access for all data objects and determines if more copies are needed in the network.  Not sure what the system's behavior is for data objects that were copied to multiple (or all) sites but then later becomes old and stale - and rarely, if ever accessed again.

There is no integrated RAID data protection, which is a big departure for us.  The idea is that all data in an Atmos network will reside in multiple sites, regardless of its access frequency. It's not likely that a customer would have a disaster that spans multiple, geographically dispersed sites. 

(As Chuck says) "Use your imagination."

Distributing data with Atmos solves the big problem customers have where a single copy of data "sitting on one spindle" (Chuck's example) in the corporate data center becomes a bottleneck.  

We did this all ourselves because no startup decided to bet the farm on it and sell it to us. We could have announced it earlier, but we weren't sure what to say about it - and still aren't.  Atmos has no competition. It fills a huge need all by itself as long as you can figure out what that is.

Please let us know if you figure that out!

Comments

[Calvin Zito]

Hi Marc,

I've appreciated your work from afar for a long time. In fact, I just saw one of your books on my bookshelf in the office.

Our scalable NAS chief technologist at HP posted his thoughts on Atmos (as did I earlier in the day) on our blog at www.hp.com/storage/blog.

You've joined a number of my old HP colleagues at 3PAR that were a big part of bringing the XP array into our portfolio (not to mention one array that we said goodbye to) - they were fun days and a good bunch of people. Say hi to David, Craig, and Geoff for me.

All the best,
Calvin Zito
HP StorageWorks

[Chuck Hollis]

Marc -- what happened to that happy-go-lucky blogger we all knew a while back?

You've turned into the industry sourpuss.

Lighten up, man!

-- Chuck

[marc farley]

Thanks Calvin, will do.

[marc farley]

Thanks Chuck, the schizophrenia just happens. I really wish I could stop it, but the daily pressures of hunting, gathering, writing, driving and filming tear the lizard brain asunder from the restrained neocortex, then its a mashup as fingers fight for control of the keyboard.

The struggle within looks like this graphic:
http://www.psycheducation.org/emotion/R_comp3.gif
(or so I'm told)