EMC Atmos Online Cloud Down Amid Updates

Users attempting to log onto EMC Atmos Online Wednesday morning and afternoon were met by this greeting: "EMC Atmos Online Temporarily Down For Maintenance: The web site is currently unavailable and will be back up shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience."

Later in the morning, users attempting to log in received the message: "No suitable nodes are available to serve your request."

In a statement, EMC said the Atmos Online outage was caused by maintenance issues, but did not elaborate.

"We are servicing Atmos Online for maintenance, which happens from time to time as we are still in beta mode for the online solution. With that, all current beta customers still have access to their data. We will be done with maintenance shortly," EMC said in a statement e-mailed to Channelweb.com Wednesday afternoon.

EMC did not divulge how long the outage lasted, how many Atmos Online users were affected or what type of maintenance knocked it offline.

EMC launched Atmos Online last May as a scalable online storage infrastructure built on its Atmos technology.

Wednesday's Atmos Online outage comes as EMC revealed sweeping updates to its on-premise Atmos offering, adding new data protection capabilities, updating hardware and minimizing its storage footprint. Additional enhancements boost performance and scale while lowering costs, EMC said.

The updates to Atmos, the first since EMC launched the internal, on-premise cloud storage platform in November 2008, add GeoProtect functionality that lets customers control the flexibility to apply the right performance and protection levels to content based on lifecycle, value and data availability needs. GeoProtect users a protection technique called "erasure coding," which divides an object into multiple segments through predetermined policies set by the customer and automatically distributes the content across customer infrastructure to let Atmos seamless recreate the content in the event of downtime or a disaster. GeoProtect can also replicate content and distribute it to the right location.

EMC also upgraded Atmos to the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and added higher-density, 2 TB disk drives. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series upgrade can boost performance by more than 50 percent, EMC said. Meanwhile, the 2-TB disk drives double the capacity for cloud infrastructures.

While EMC Atmos Online users do not need Atmos, EMC does offer the ability to federate between internal and external Atmos clouds.