EMC Axes Atmos Online Cloud Storage Service

EMC has deep-sixed its year-old Atmos Online cloud storage service and is pointing customers to its growing ecosystem of partners for Atmos-based cloud storage.

EMC revealed it will no longer support Atmos Online for production usage and that Atmos Online will continue on as a cloud development environment in a letter e-mailed to Atmos Online users and posted on EMC's web site.

EMC has not disclosed how many Atmos Online users it had.

"We are writing to inform you that we are no longer planning to support production usage of Atmos Online," EMC wrote in the letter. "Going forward, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by our continuously expanding range of service provider partners who offer production services. We will no longer offer paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services."

Along with announcing it will no longer support production environments for Atmos Online, EMC said it will also no longer provide any SLA or availability commitments for Atmos Online. Further, EMC urged users to migrate critical data or production workloads served via Atmos Online to a partner-offered Atmos-based service. EMC told users, however, that the shift will have no immediate impact on customer data. Currently, EMC has existing Atmos-based partnerships with three service providers: AT&T's Synaptic Storage, Hosted Solutions' Stratus Cloud Storage and Peer 1 Hosting's CloudOne service.

"In the short term, these changes will neither affect your existing accounts nor your existing data," EMC said.

The EMC Atmos Online cloud storage service was announced in May 2009 as a highly scalable and highly reliable online storage infrastructure built on the company's Atmos technology. EMC billed it as a Cloud Optimized Storage offering that lets users move and manage large amounts of data in the cloud with reliable service levels, information protection and secure access. The service struggled from the get-go and according to EMC the company is ditching its own Atmos Online offering in a move to not compete with its partners that offer Atmos-based cloud storage services.

"As the number of service providers adopting EMC Atmos technology continues to expand, EMC decided not to announce the general availability of Atmos Online storage service for production usage," Jon Martin, Director, Product Management and Marketing at EMC, said in a statement to CRN. "The strength of the Atmos ecosystem is predominantly based on the service providers who deliver Atmos-based services and ISVs who integrate with the technology. EMC will focus on evolving this ecosystem and allow Atmos Online to take a supporting role."

Martin added that Atmos Online will continue on as a developer environment where EMC helps ISVs and developers integrate to the technology to deliver their solutions across Atmos-based service providers. Atmos Online will continue to be a reference architecture for service providers who will deliver Atmos-based cloud storage services.

Martin recommended that customers that had been looking to move to production sign on with AT&T, Hosted Solutions or Peer 1 Hosting for Atmos-based production environments. Meanwhile, EMC said existing production accounts will not be billed for past or future usage.