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.

Thanks Halifax VMUG!

The Halifax VMUG group has been running strong for 6 years thanks to the dedicated efforts of Percy Gouchie, Greg Heard and Alex Stefishen. 

OnX sponsored the event and movie: The Equalizer starring Denzel Washington.  It was great to get the opportunity to present my VMworld Presentation to the user group out East. 

The event was well attended with over sixty members making the trek to Halifax.  John Deveau, an OnX customer, showcased many of the custom dashboards they have developed for their own use.  In addition Ryan Veino from VMware recapped some of the product announcements from VMworld. 

Feedback was excellent from the attendees with many finding the content both relevant and useful to some of the VMware technology they are working with or considering implementing.  Many thanks to our hosts and sponsor and for Lynn Morrison, one of the great Account Reps from OnX Enterprise Solutions for helping get it together.

virtualguru.org @ VMworld 2014

Technorati Tags: #vmworld

Well it has been a busy couple of weeks at the show but it was a great event.  Stephane Asselin (@virtualstef) and I had a great time at our presentation during VMworld 2014. We had over 370 people attend in person; a special thanks to those who attended virtually. With well over 500 registered we had lots of great questions after. For those who missed it, the recording of our session “EUC1289 - What’s New in End User Computing: Full Desktop Automation and Self-Service” has been released on the VMworld website (http://www.vmworld.com).

Not only was our session well attended but we also had lots of support for our most recent publication “VMware Horizon Suite: Building End User Services”. 

We appreciate all the great feedback and many thanks to those of you who came out on the last day for the book signing. We had a great time working with Eric Sloof (@esloof) and the crew of VMworld TV for the “VMware Press Trivia Challenge Book Give Away Event”. 

If you missed our discussion and interview regarding the book then you can catch it here on VMworld TV. 

I managed to get out quite a few posts for those of you following the http://virtualguru.org blog but have more coming.  There was just so much information and so little time so stay tuned for additional information from the show.