Welcome, EMC

Today, EMC announced their Atmos product, perviously code-named "Maui". It is an interesting offering, and one that we are quite familiar with... given that object-based storage is what Bycast has been developing since 2000, and has had deployed and operational in customer sites since 2002.

Let's do a quick rundown of the core features that Bycast StorageGRID offers that are also offered by Atmos:

• Object based storage? Check
• Metadata with objects? Check
• Multi-site? Check
• Multi-tenancy? Check
• File-system interface? Check
• Web-services API? Check
• Policy-driven replication? Check
• Compression? Check
• Object-based De-dupe? Check
• Object versioning? Check
• MAID-style spin-down? Check
• Web-based admin? Check

There are also a couple of significant features found in StorageGRID that are not present in Atmos:

• Encryption? Unknown
• Object integrity protection? Unknown
• Clustered gateways? Unknown
• Storage hardware independent? Nope
• Storage vendor independent? Nope
• Support for tape and other high-latency media? Nope
• Six years of operation in the field? Nope
• Mature, customer-proven product? Nope

Over the last five years of deploying large-scale distributed object-based storage systems, we've learned a lot about what things work well, and where things go wrong. Based on the initial feature set, we know that Atmos will be a successful offering for EMC. There will, of course, be the usual teething pains, not unlike those that happened with Centera, but that is the nature of all 1.0 software.

So, to our friends at EMC, I say, Welcome. We're glad to see object-based storage becoming mainstream.