Checking out the possibilities of a storage cloud platform with Atmos and Panzura: The advancement, acceptance, and continued growth in use of the public cloud storage and backup services gives us, the end users, options and capabilities that we just did not have available to us before the birth of the cloud. How many times have we used services like Dropbox to move, share, or store some form of data that we might been working on. Having this kind of capability helps to make our lives easier, but it is also a nightmare for corporate security folks whose job is to protect and secure the corporate data.
More and more companies are looking into establishing their own private storage cloud platform or Storage-as-a-Service. This storage service can offer a wide range of options and abilities which could fundamentally change the way we look at geographical and or remote locations. One such solution is EMC’s Atmos Cloud Storage Platform.
EMC Atmos: Object-based cloud storage platform to store, archive, and access unstructured content at scale. Atmos provides the essential building blocks for enterprises and service providers to transform to private, hybrid, and public cloud storage.
With EMC’s Atmos, companies will have an Atmos node in each location; each node will replicate to the others. This will give each location the ability to access any and all the data, for all locations. This also removes the need to back up this data in each location separately.
Let’s take this concept one step forward. Deploying a Panzura Global Cloud Storage System with an EMC Atmos cloud provides globally-distributed enterprises with worldwide access to all files, distributed file locking, global deduplication, encryption, snapshots, access management, and massive scalability in capacity. This combination of a robust and flexible global file system with elastic EMC-backed object storage brings the benefits of the cloud seamlessly and securely to users throughout the enterprise.
Think about that for second, and think about the doors that this setup will open in respect to geographical or remote locations utilizing server virtualization. Panzura’s CloudFS global file system complements existing VMware functionality like VMotion, increasing the value enterprises get from their virtualized environment. For example, with VMotion, when a VM gets moved from one ESX host to another, all the services in that VM’s ecosystem (e.g., permissions, backups, snapshots) must be moved as well. With Panzura’s CloudFS file system, all of those ecosystem services are available to each VM regardless of where they are moved in the infrastructure, even if to a completely different part of the world. This essentially takes all of the locations and ties them together as a single infrastructure.
This has the ability to be a huge game changer in the design and deployments of virtual and cloud computing platforms, virtually eliminating the need for backups of the virtual infrastructure in each of the geographical or remote locations. Disaster recovery and business continuity of the virtual environment is greatly enhanced, with the ability to start and run virtual machines in any location at any time. If your company finds itself in the path of a hurricane or other natural disaster, the workloads can be migrated ahead of time or restarted at the remote site. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.