31 July 2010
Saturday
EMC tweaks Atmos storage
By Beth Pariseau | Feb 19, 2010
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PrintEMC Corp. today made its first update to its Atmos cloud storage system since its release in November 2008, adding a series of high-density hardware configurations and a new data protection option called GeoProtect.
The next generation of EMC Atmos hardware, the WS2 series, adds Intel Corp.'s Nehalem quad-core processors to the server component of the rack, and 2 TB SATA drives for double the capacity of the WS1 models. EMC has also added memory to the new hardware configurations, which has the company claiming a 50% total performance improvement over the WS1 series.
The WS2-120 can now offer up to 240 TB capacity, and a half-populated 60 TB version of the WS2-120 is also being made available for entry configurations or remote offices of large enterprise companies. The WS2-240 holds up to 480 TB, while the WS2-360 holds 720 TB.
EMC launches GeoProtect
Atmos 1.0 supported replication of full copies of objects among geographically dispersed systems as the only option for data protection. Atmos 1.3 adds GeoProtect, a RAID-like option that splits fragments of data within each data object among geographically dispersed locations. With GeoProtect, data can be restored if fragments are lost.
The fragments are geographically dispersed in coded segments. Two options are available with this release for GeoProtect: a 9/12 encoding ratio -- nine fragments are dispersed within 12 coded segments -- for RAID-like data protection with 33% storage capacity overhead; and a 10/16 ratio that can tolerate up to six failures at 66% capacity overhead.
Jon Martin, director of product management at EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Group, said customers can assign GeoProtect and replication to objects according to policy within the same Atmos system. Because there's latency involved in reconstructing an object from geographically dispersed fragments, GeoProtect will likely be used for "content that needs to be retained but infrequently accessed." For lifecycle management, customers can replicate objects for a certain length of time, then store them using GeoProtect for long-term archival retention.
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
