Software-defined storage specialist Atlantis Computing announced its Ilio USX platform designed for virtualized server workloads such as databases, mail, collaboration, big data and an array of business applications.
The software enables customers to deploy more virtual machines (VMs) on their existing storage, and can pool and optimize a wide variety of storage classes including storage area network (SAN), network area storage (NAS), random access memory (RAM) or any type of direct attached storage (DAS), including solid state storage, Flash and SAS or SATA storage to create hybrid, hyper-converged or all-flash storage from existing data center resources.
The platform is designed to help reduce the inefficiencies of storage silos by unifying all storage types into a pool of storage resources that are available to all applications.
The company’s approach is to insert transparently existing virtualized data centers through the deployment of VMs, which integrate with the hypervisor layer to present standard file and block based storage to applications.
It integrates with existing provisioning workflows and orchestration systems through representational state transfer (REST) application programing interfaces (APIs) to enable automated policy-based provisioning.
“VMware ESX initiated a disruption in the server market once the concept of server virtualization was proven for mission critical applications over 10 years ago,” Paul Burns, principal analyst at cloud research firm Neovise, said in a statement. “The enterprise storage industry has been waiting for a similar tipping point, for a breakthrough technology that can drive up the utilization rates and reduce the overall storage costs of enterprise storage supporting virtualized environments.”
The platform is designed to enable organizations to abstract any SAN, NAS, DAS, flash or server RAM to create capacity and performance resource pools, which are then used to dynamically define and create the optimal type of storage characteristics for each application.
“We have been using the software for more than a year for our VDI deployment and I have been looking forward to implementing it for our databases and other server workloads since I first saw the tech preview at VMworld 2013,” Erick Stoeckle, network system manager and IT architect at Northrim Bank, said in a statement. “With the platform, we were able to take our EqualLogic arrays and pool them with our Nimble arrays to more than double our available storage capacity, while delivering a ten-fold increase in the performance.”
The aim of the technology is to give IT organizations the ability to unify all classes of storage, delivering critical data services such as high availability, data protection, inline deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.