Cloud storage might be a good idea for some use cases, but that doesn’t mean any service provider is a good choice. EMC announced last week that its Atmos Online service was no longer offering any SLA’s and is no longer supported for production usage:
We will no longer be offering paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services. Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage. We will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment. As a result, we strongly encourage that you migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to one of our partners offering Atmos based services.
This won’t be the last service provider that terminates a cloud offering; while Amazon is widely seen as an example of a successful cloud computing company, many people easily forget that they started this business by renting out excess capacity. Other companies that are trying to replicate that success by building a dedicated cloud offering and try to undercut Amazon’s pricing at the same time might be in for hard times.
That doesn’t mean using cloud storage is a bad idea; but having a migration strategy in place in case you have to switch providers fast should be a part of any serious cloud strategy. Tools such as the Nasuni cloud storage gateway can help when implementing this, and more tools should be popping up soon.
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