The Tech Updates Dot Com

EMC is planning to launch a cloud computing service to compliment its Atmos on-demand storage service at the end of this month, according to a vendor working with the storage giant on the project.  The computing cloud will be built on Cisco’s Unified Computing System gear, which makes sense given that EMC is a big partner in Cisco’s server efforts. Neither EMC , nor Cisco, responded to a request for comment.

John Donnelly III, senior VP of sales and marketing at LineSider, said his company will provide the software that EMC plans to resell to folks using EMC’s cloud computing offering. The LineSider software works with Cisco, Juniper and 3Com switches, and is part of a field of growing importance in enterprise computing circles as businesses try to set and enforce limits on who can access the cloud, and what they can put there. LineSider’s software allows a company to set those policies and then replicate them for different classes of employees for a customer running a private virtualized infrastructure, or for a service provider like EMC, as a service offering for different types of businesses.

EMC’s upcoming Atmos Online Compute Service cloud looks to be in beta, and documentation available on EMC’s web site shows that customers can currently sign up for no more than 20 virtual machines ranging in size from 2GB to 16GB each. The EMC cloud is based on VMware, which will likely turn off those looking for clouds built on more open hypervisors. The move to offer on-demand computing is a logical next step for EMC in the wake of its on-demand storage product launch. With it, EMC will join the ever-increasing ranks of large vendors building out a true cloud computing product.