So this is hot news! For those that aren’t familiar with Atlantis it is a company that appeared 4 years ago and the worked with one object RAM as primary storage.
They had the ILIO product around for a couple of years now, pointing at the VDI and XenApp marked.
ILIO is a virtual appliance which runs on top of either Hyper-V or VMware ESX and there it takes physical ram from the host and present it out as storage to the hypervisor (either as iSCSI or NFS) And on top of this is can do inline deduplication and compression to mention a few features. Which allows for a great performance improvement and offloading the back end SAN.
So that was a quick overview of ILIO. With USX Atlantis takes it a bit further. They describe it as Software defined Storage. Meaning that we are going to be able to mix and match a bunch of different storage vendors and drives to create it as a single resource and having the ability to run from RAM as well.
From Atlantis’s own website
Atlantis ILIO USX (Unified Software-defined Storage)—the industry’s first in-memory software-defined storage solution, enabling IT to support up to 5x more VMs on the existing storage resources they already have today, dropping the cost of storage by up to 50%.
Atlantis ILIO USX gives IT the flexibility to get more out of existing storage investments, and creates new software-defined storage hybrid arrays, hyper-converged systems, and all-flash arrays by aggregating and pooling the SSDs, SAS, flash, and RAM for any number of servers.
Atlantis ILIO USX eliminates the inefficiencies of storage silos, that have been created to support specific applications, by unifying all storage types into a highly-optimized pool of storage resources that are made available to all applications. Policy-based control then optimizes capacity, availability and performance based on application needs, resulting in lower storage costs and better VM performance.
source: http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/solutions/overview
They have also added a techincal FAQ which shows a bit about the flexibility this is going to deliver.
What type of application workloads does Atlantis ILIO USX support?
A. Atlantis ILIO USX was designed from the ground up to support any server workload and has a range of storage volume types that provide optimal capacity reduction, performance and availability for the target application. It is suitable for a wide variety of application workloads from MS-SQL to Exchange and big data workloads such as Hadoop.
Q. What type of storage can be used?
A. Any storage that can be presented to the hypervisor can be pooled and optimized by Atlantis ILIO USX. This includes SAN, NAS, flash arrays and local DAS including SATA, SAS, flash, SSD and RAM.
Q. Do you provide High Availability (HA)?
A. Yes. Atlantis ILIO USX provides integrated HA and data protection for the Atlantis ILIO USX storage volume. There is no single point of failure. Atlantis ILIO USX HA has no reliance on external HA functionality provided by the hypervisor layer. Customers can still use the hypervisor’s HA and DRS functionality to provide VM level protection.
Q. Can Atlantis ILIO USX create a hyperconverged infrastructure (storage and compute combined)?
A. Yes. Atlantis ILIO USX can pool local server resources such as SAS, Flash, SSD and RAM to create a hyper-converged infrastructure.
Q. Does Atlantis ILIO USX support VMware vSAN?
A. Yes, Atlantis ILIO USX can pool VMware vSAN along with any other types of storage and provide optimization that improves performance and reduces capacity utilization for vSAN.
Q. Can I pool storage between public and private clouds?
A. Yes, this has been tested with Amazon Storage Gateway, EC2 and S3. For solution details, please contact Atlantis Computing.
Q. What hypervisors are supported?
A. Atlantis ILIO USX has been designed to be hypervisor agnostic. The initial release will support VMware vSphere 5.x or later. Additional hypervisor platform support will be delivered in a future release. Atlantis ILIO Desktop Virtualization products are already available on VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
Q. Are all writes committed to physical storage?
A. Atlantis ILIO USX has the option to configure a storage volume to provide different levels of protection. All storage volume types have the capability of guaranteeing that writes are committed down to physical storage before being acknowledged back to the application layer.
Q. What are the minimum requirements
You can read more about it here –> http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/downloads/Atlantis_ILIO_USX_Solution_Brief.pdf