by Greg Roody
With EMC’s recent announcements of Atmos-VE (virtual edition), and the ability to set up Atmos as a VM for either production or test, the possibilities for evaluating a Private Cloud environment for free just became easier.
Well, to be clear, Atmos-VE itself isn’t free, you have to buy it, but “Atmos in a Box” (AiaB) is free and publically available for people to try and learn on. We have actually been using it for quite a while for development and test, and it works very well.
Luckily, I don’t need to describe the solution for you since Chad Sakac does an excellent job in his Virtual Geek blog. He also provides download and installation instructions if you would like to try it.
And of course, CloudArray™ will connect to your AiaB environment as easily as Atmos-VE or any of the Atmos hardware based services available from our partners like AT&T Synaptics, Hosted Solutions, or even Atmos On-line (www.atmosonline.com). You can even use CloudArray to move data between Clouds if that becomes necessary.
So what does CloudArray bring to the table for Atmos?
Atmos itself, like other Cloud Storage platforms, communicates natively with clients using a rich set of API’s. You are of course free to develop new applications using those API’s, or you can use CloudArray as a SAN gateway to your Atmos storage device. Any application server in your environment that can mount volumes using iSCSI can connect to your Atmos storage pools, without the need to reprogram them or manage them any differently than you do today. You gain self service provisioning, reporting, zero footprint snapshots, compression, encryption, and all the other advanced features that CloudArray provides.
And since CloudArray is also a VM based software solution, there is no requirement to lay in a lot of very expensive, sole-purpose hardware to either evaluate or deploy a solution. CloudArray is free to try for 30 days, so lay in your AiaB environment, add CloudArray, and start using your Private Storage cloud in a purely test environment. Since it’s all virtual, you already know the drill to move from test to production.
CloudArray is a natural companion to Atmos in building your Private Cloud. Applications like Exchange 2010, Oracle, backup and archive solutions, and virtually any legacy application can start to take advantage or your new infrastructure.
You have real business applications that can benefit from Private Cloud Storage. CloudArray can help you connect them.
Give it a try, it’s all free (some assembly required however).
