EMC last week joined the cloud storage game with a hardware/software combination that offers massive storage capacity to Web 2.0, telecom and large enterprises who need somewhere to keep their object-based, unstructured data.

Called Atmos, the system is now available in storage capacities ranging from 120TB to 360TB.

Atmos also includes a policy-based information management component that lets administrators place data based on its type, etc. The information management services included with Atmos are file versioning; deduplication; power saving drive spin down; replication; and compression.

Atmos, short for atmosphere, is built on the concept of every file being an object that can be managed by its content rather than file size. The system is designed for multiterabyte deployments. It is unlike content-addressable storage, which as specified by EMC is for the storage of immutable data for compliance reasons. EMC terms Atmos content-optimized storage – storage that is distributed into a cloud and managed with policies.

Atmos doesn’t require EMC hardware and uses Web 2.0 APIs such as REST and SOAP.

Until this point, cloud computing has been dominated by companies such as Amazon S3, Nirvanix and IBM with its XIV acquisition.

EMC has not disclosed any pricing information on Atmos.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.