(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Information infrastructure systems, software and services provider EMC (www.emc.com) is no longer planning to support production usage of its cloud storage service, Atmos Online, discontinuing any and all paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services.
According to a noted posted by the EMC Cloud Infrastructure Services Team to the EMC Atmos site, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by a range of service provider partners.
Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage.
EMC will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment, and it is strongly encouraging customers to migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to a partner offering Atmos-based services.
Analyst firm Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) notes that the shutdown of Atmos Online serves as a cautionary note for enterprises looking at cloud services. Atmos Online was originally designed as a proof of concept to show the value of the cloud, however, its demise has substantiated concerns over the longer term viability of cloud services.
“Beyond the Amazon business model of renting out existing excess capacity, it is often unclear how new cloud players are going to successfully monetize the cloud,” Info-Tech Research analyst Laura Hansen-Kohls said in a statement. “The Atmos example proves that this concern should not be limited to smaller players.”
According to Info-Tech, EMC’s sudden abandonment of Atmos Online is most likely because it was directly competing against its own partners in the space, but it was also likely due to less-than-expected customer growth or a higher-than-anticipated cost of supplying the service.
EMC’s canning of Atmos Online lends weight to one of Info-Tech’s classic cautions for evaluating the cloud — availability and reliability — emphasizing the necessity for enterprises to have continuity plans in place in the case that a cloud service ceases to exist.
Prior to closing down Atmos Online, EMC Atmos was selected as the basis for CloudOne Storage, a scalable cloud storage product from managed hosting provider PEER 1 Hosting (www.peer1.com), providing web hosting customers pay-as-you-go online storage for data files and rich media from $0.15 per GB per month.
In May, cloud storage client developer Gladinet (www.gladinet.com) launched an access platform for EMC Atmos cloud storage, enabling small and medium-sized businesses to attach Atmos storage to their file servers, letting IT professionals attach EMC Atmos cloud storage to existing IT infrastructure, creating a cost-effective multi-tiered storage solution with low migration impact and faster backup or restore times.
