New weapons for the cloud computing battle

EMC Atmos

EMC, one of the industry's pioneers in 'virtualisation' and an emerging leader in cloud computing, had appeared tentative for a while in rolling out its new cloud computing platform. Atmos, its hosted storage offering, launched last year but EMC was relatively quiet about it. That is, until last month. Then, EMC made an announcement: It would work to give a boost to its Atmos cloud infrastructure platform by adding data protection technology, which it calls GeoProtect, as well as upgrading its entire'hosting'infrastructure'to servers running Intel Xeon 5500 chips.

The Xeon 5500s are, simply, the most powerful processors we've ever seen in the'CRN'Test Centre lab. Last year, in one instance, we were able to take a dual-Xeon server, two 5570 CPUs, and install Windows Server 2008 R2 and 20 functioning virtual servers in about an hour. In a'server'the size of two pizza boxes, we were able to build a stable, virtual 'data center' in no time.

The system itself registered a Geekbench score of almost 15,000. Even though this happened a year ago, that's still the highest system score we've ever seen with that benchmark.

When one of the biggest players in the industry adopts the most powerful hardware standard for one of its most critical, emerging lines of business, it makes a statement. Hardware still counts. EMC could have just said it would upgrade its data centre and left it at that. But by going public with the details, EMC was making a statement and challenging the rest of the industry to do the same.'

Amazon Web Services (S3, Simple Storage Service)

When we last examined Amazon.com's cloud offerings a year ago, we found its EC2 "elastic cloud" to be a turnkey-simple, pay-as-you go, Web-based hosted server solution.

A lot has happened since then: Competition has increased; cloud companies have built out a lot more infrastructure and more enterprises than ever are open to giving it a try. But Amazon fueled perhaps the biggest alteration to the cloud market when it decided to slash pricing dramatically over the past several months with its Amazon Simple Storage Service.

Enterprise cloud storage is the most crowded portion of the hosted IT space, it's the easiest place to find value (EMC, Rackspace and Data Deposit Box all offer laudable solutions here), and reliability and availability are making some improvement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now provides software development kits for Java and .Net, including libraries, sample code and APIs, meaning it provides a platform for application development and deployment. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), essentially, sets the industry standard for cloud-based storage and backup. Integrated well into the AWS fabric, Amazon.com's Amazon CloudFront, for example, provides the ability to import, export or access data stored on its cloud in a matter of a few clicks. It offers the option to have data distributed via download or streaming, allocate elastic IP addresses, make snapshots, create security groups and load balancers, and bundle tasks.

As it provides greater levels of management, customisation, security and accessibility, Amazon's approach also offers greater levels of complexity. For example, the process of creating "buckets" to hold objects on Amazon's cloud requires an amount of coding and line commands that other services don't require for baseline service. (Creating a "bucket" with an HTTP request requires 32 lines of code.)

For many enterprises just beginning to migrate to a cloud-based model for data storage and backup, Amazon may be a natural choice to evaluate, and it offers good pricing once you pass the petabyte-level of data required for storage. However, for those that want to make the move to a cloud-based model a little easier, other solutions such as Rackspace or Data Deposit Box may be a wiser alternative.