Atlantis sucks the storage cost out of enterprise apps
June 28, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
Atlantis Computing thinks that as cheap as storage has become, it’s still too expensive. Its goal is to suck as much of that cost out of your IT infrastructure as possible. First it offered software that CEO Bernard Harguindeguy says cuts the storage requirement for desktop virtualiation implementations by up to 90 percent. The ILIO Diskless VDI software does so by compressing the data and using local desktop storage to shoulder the burden.
Now, this GigaOM Launchpad finalist is applying its software smarts to storage-intensive server applications such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server as well with ILIO Flexcloud.
“Hadoop requires a lot of storage very close to the compute resource, we think we solve that problem,” he said. Running it on server RAM lets you virtualize Hadoop and run multiple copies on the same server sharing RAM as the primary storage, Atlantis CEO Bernard Harquindeguy told me in a recent interview…
“We focus on applications that need massive storage and high performance. The first was virtual desktop deployments which used to require a lot of expensive storage to deploy a desktop that works well. We removed up to 90 percent or more of that need for external storage by running the applications on RAM inside the desktops and now we’re doing it in the server,” he said.
Most data centers have enough RAM to fit this model, in his view. “Servers in modern-day data centers typically have 256G of RAM in the box,” he said. However, fast-movers in the hyperscale world such as Facebook, have moved to all-flash storage in their servers.
By virtue of its VDI product, Atlantis already has a toe hold in some very blue-chip customers– banking giant JPMorganChase which fields 70,000 VDI seats uses Atlantis’ earlier product, for example.
Harguindeguy and team sport enterprise IT mojo. While he was general manager of Novell’s Enterprise Division as it grew into a $145-million business. His top execs come from VMware, Citrix and NetAPP.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Atlantis most recently raised $10 million in Series C funding from Cisco Systems, Partech International and El Dorado Ventures.
As the economy continues to sputter, IT departments that keep trying to wring as much performance as possible out of their existing infrastructure might find technologies like those from Atlantis appealing.