Intel Partners with EMC on Cloud Storage

Intel and EMC have announced a joint effort to improve the energy efficiency of EMC's Atmos cloud storage system which is expected to be available in the latter half of 2010. EMC's Atmos system is a hardware and software platform that is used to spread data storage across several different datacenters on a large scale. This concept has already taken off, as earlier this year, EMC announced its first customer for the Atmos data distribution system. AT&T's Synaptic pay-as-you-go hosting service.

In order to reduce the power consumption and improve overall power management, EMC has decided to upgrade the Atmos with Intels next generation and energy efficient Xeon servers codenamed Nehalem. Other steps for reducing energy costs include intelligent power management, which will turn off hard disks when not active, as well as software improvements provided by Intel's Node Manager tool to reduce power consumption during idle periods. The overall strategy of this partnership is to reduce the cost per megawatt of these petabyte scale storage systems.

More details and information about these upgraded Atmos servers are expected to come forth as their release date approaches.