Computerworld - EMC today unveiled upgrades to its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform that add new metering services and additional administrative reporting and controls.
In addition, the Atmos GeoDrive, a piece of software that presents cloud storage as a drive letter on client systems, can now be deployed on Linxux servers. Previously, it could only be used on Windows systems.
Atmos is EMC's cloud software, designed to manage information for globally distributed big data and cloud storage environments.
It allows unstructured data to reside on multiple systems and data center locations, while still providing administrators with a single console view and policy-based control of the infrastructure.
EMC sells its Atmos product to be used in both corporate data centers and by storage service providers who want to create a services-oriented architecture for customers.
The EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform is an add-on application that gives end users Web-based access to Atmos-based cloud services with the ability to set up their own accounts to store and access data. It also allows cloud administrators to set up metering of storage and bandwidth consumption by cloud users for chargeback purposes.
New Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform v1.1 is packaged as a VMware vApp and enables users to install a turnkey storage-as-a-service offering with a few clicks of the mouse.
EMC said the platform also has expanded metering capabilities, allowing admins to determine how the cloud was accessed by any user. For example, the metering software can determine whether the cloud was accessed through a Web-based REST API or through a corporate file system protocol.
It also allows cloud administrators to see how much bandwidth is being consumed by end users, enabling them to suspend accounts that are exceeding limits.
V1.1 also allows companies to customize their Atmos cloud web portal. Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform comes preconfigured out of the box, but "it turns out in many cases service providers have their own customization they want to do to those pages," said Jon Martin, a director of marketing at EMC.
"Now they can get a license for the source code and fit it into their environment," he said.
Users could, for example, set up the Web portals to collect additional information about users, add their corporate logos to the page or place additional links on it.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at 
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