Patrick Eaton, the Berkeley PhD. who architected EMC’s Atmos cloud storage product, left EMC about 3 months ago. He joined a Boston-area search firm, Endeca, where he is a software architect working on a team to scale Endeca’s core MDEX search engine.
Dr. Eaton co-authored a couple of key papers on the computer science underpinning Atmos.
The StorageMojo take
The Atmos project is having a rocky time of it inside EMC. The sales force, which traditionally has had a lot of autonomy as long as they deliver the numbers, isn’t excited about selling much lower-cost/GB storage. Conservative enterprise IT buyers are as leery of unproven technology from EMC as they are from anyone else. And EMC hasn’t been crowing about Atmos either.
I recall a quote from Patrick where he commented on the all the resources Atmos was getting – dozens of people, exec attention – and I thought that might be a mixed blessing. Trying to solve hard problems to meet the CEO’s deadline is no one’s idea of a good time – especially a newly minted PhD.
Kudos to EMC for the Atmos effort and I wish them success. Yet several former EMC’ers have told me that EMC is not the most congenial place to do software. Given the enterprise sale force’s focus on hardware I find that easy to believe: the temptation for sales to discount “free” software to close a big hardware deal is almost irresistible.
And Atmos is a far step beyond EMC’s traditional management and data protection software. It is a whole new product family whose economics and implications are not well understood.
The bottom line: it is rarely a good sign when a company can’t keep the architect of a new product on board. Yes, there are other architects out there, but it usually means that some decisions were made that people now wish were made differently. Only time will tell what the case is with Atmos.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. EMC doesn’t brief me on Atmos or anything else since I won’t sign the non-disclosure agreements (NDA) they require of all analysts. Why brief people who talk and write for a living and then require them not to talk or write about the briefing?
Robin
Although I can see what EMC are trying to achieve, I think there are fundamental roadblocks in the way of people’s view of Atmos. That’s mainly because they have a historic view on how storage should be offered, making thinking into the future more difficult. For me, the biggest hurdle has been the removal of RAID from the architecture. I don’t want to write data to a storage device that has hundreds/thousands of disk devices in it and have one of them fail just as I write my data. OK, I can replicate data to other nodes, but that’s asynchronous and data can be lost in that time.
I think it will be the case that Atmos will require more deployments and good news stories before it gains widespread acceptance. Otherwise it could be another inVista.
Chris
I like the idea behind Atmos, but it seems like it’s not Atmos’s time now. Especially when V-Max boxes are around for less than a year, and are demolishing the competition. I can understand EMC’s decision to sell as many V-Max boxes as possible, and not some cloud storage in the era when we don’t know what will happen to cloud technology at all.
But, again, this could be either good or bad decision. We’ll have to wait and see what will happen.
Seems to me that Atmos is going the way of Centera. A sales force that basically refuses to sell it, the inveitable down-turn in sales, the good guys see the writing on the wall and finally….well just to say lucky for Atmos that they don’t have engineering in Belgium.
Um. Atmos is quietly selling to a discrete set of buyers in large volumes, guys. It sells in very large lots (multi petabyte procurements). You have to understand the edge case it is most appropriate for: files (not blocks), requirements for 2-3 replicates, and an integrated dissemination architecture. It’s purpose-built to handle the world-wide file distribution problem of many web companies. It’s NOT purpose-built to be a drop in replacement for all of EMC’s other storage, so it should be no surprise that it is selling to its niche.
Joe.