ITWire

The EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance was introduced in mid 2011 to allow the automatic migration of inactive files to cloud storage in order to maximise efficiency, optimise performance, and reduce costs.

At that time, it could only be used with Atmos based public or private storage systems. More than 40 public cloud providers offer Atmos storage.

The latest version of the Appliance also supports Amazon S3 as a storage tier.

Where flash storage is used for first-tier storage, the Appliance can also move stale data to EMC Data Domain, Centera, Isilon or VNX storage in addition to Atmos or Amazon S3.

Other changes include built-in encryption with RSA key management technology to reduce concerns about storing data in public clouds, and the use of compression to optimise bandwidth and capacity usage.

It is also capable of handling up to 500 million files per appliance, twice as many as the previous version.

"EMC has long recognised the value of the cloud — and this latest version of CTA alleviates the challenges of public cloud storage, while providing options for the public cloud," said Eric Herzog, senior vice president, product management and product marketing, at EMC's unified storage division.

"The new encryption, compression, and scalability features directly impact IT's bottom line by extending customers' 'flash first' strategies and future-proofing their storage assets."

The Cloud Tiering Appliance is offered as a physical appliance or as a VMware virtual appliance.