The Evolution of Atlantis: USX

Atlantis Computing delivered a great event at Woodbine Racetrack organized by Ross Di Stefano, Canadian Sales Director at Atlantis Computing and Lisa Kramer the Inside Sales Representative.  Attendees had the opportunity to meet and hear Seth Knox the VP of Products at Atlantis talk about Atlantis USX.

Atlantis USX is a Software Designed Storage (SDS) solution that has been generally available since January of this year.  Interest and adoption have been strong due to the importance of Software Defined Storage (SDS).  In Seth’s presentation he explained that virtualization has driven both storage capacity and performance requirements.  The challenge with traditional storage vendors is that the level of innovation has been slow due to the dependency on hardware.  By decoupling the value of storage solutions into software, innovation can happen at a much more aggressive rate.  This is necessary as average storage requirements continue to grow at 40% a year, meaning most customers double capacity in 2½ years.  Although SDS is used to describe many things, there are certain common characteristics necessary for true software defined storage. 

Storage Consolidation: You can apply Atlantis USX to any storage pool and manage it as a single set of resources.  Atlantis will have the capability to incorporate 3rd party Cloud storage pools with a Cloud gateway feature releasing next year.

Support for Hyper-Convergence: With USX you can take Direct Attach Storage add true data services such as inline dedup and performance acceleration and present it as an enterprise class storage volumes.

Cloud Management: USX fully supports a RESTFul API to enable automation and control of the software.

USX fully supports VMware’s Virtual SAN and provides additional data services capability and enables presentation of NFS/SMB and iSCSI storage which are not native to the VMware feature set.  In addition, when vSphere 6 ships, USX will provide full support for VMware VVOLs as well.

Using the additional dedup data services, most customers report a 5:1 consolidation ratio after introducing USX.  With USX Atlantis is broadening the use case for their software beyond End User computing technologies such as virtual desktops or Server Based Computing (SBC).  While the use case remains strong for these technologies; USX enables Hyper-convergence on server blades and provides non-persistent characteristics to persistent desktop pools (lower disk requirements at less cost), Altantis is targeting other use cases including performance based database scenarios.

USX allows you to create high performance and capacity volumes or blend the underlying feature set of SSDs and disk to create hybrid volumes.  Atlantis USX enables you to scale up and out by adding performance and capacity.  If you have not had a look at USX check out "Altantis USX" or would like additional information on Software Defined Storage check out this chalk talk.