Atlantis HyperScale: All-Flash Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, No Hardware Lock-In

Atlantis Computing has leveraged its software-defined storage expertise to develop what it calls the first all-flash hyper-converged infrastructure appliance as well as the software that channel partners can use to build their own versions.

The new Atlantis HyperScale appliance will be available as a high-performance part of solutions developed with such partners as Citrix and VMware, said Chetan Venkatesh, founder, president and CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor, which counts Cisco as one of its investors.

There have been attempts to develop effective all-flash hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, but the economics of such solutions seldom work out, Venkatesh told CRN.

[Related: 13 Powerful Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solutions]

"We've created an all-flash storage solution to attack the mainstream market," he said. "We're doing it at half the price of Nutanix or SimpliVity and their spinning disk and flash solutions."

The Atlantis HyperScale appliance is based on the vendor's own software-defined storage intellectual property, which applies such capabilities as deduplication and compression to increase the efficiency of flash storage, Venkatesh said.

The new Atlantis HyperScale integrates compute, storage and networking capabilities as a single software stack that channel partners can integrate on their choice of server hardware from Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Lenovo or Supermicro, Venkatesh said. It works with both VMware and Citrix hypervisors.

The software is designed to operate with Intel Xeon processors and Intel SSDs, he said. "The networking part uses standard 10-Gbit Ethernet," he said. "The solution includes a Broadcom-based white-label switch for the Supermicro and Lenovo variants, making them fully converged. Cisco Nexus and HP switches can be ordered as an option."

Atlantis Computing has gone far beyond what other hyper-converged infrastructure solutions have done, said Bill Kleyman, vice president of strategy and innovation at MTM Technologies, an Arlington Heights, Ill.-based solution provider and Atlantis channel partner.

By developing a hyper-converged infrastructure software stack that works with multiple vendors' hardware and hypervisors, Atlantis offers a high degree of flexibility to solution providers, Kleyman told CRN.

"This is game-changing," he said. "No one else out there is doing this. Customers are not locked to a particular vendor. Atlantis has extracted the hardware so the software works on any server."

MTM has worked with Atlantis for seven years, during which it has seen the vendor prove its ILIO software for offloading cache and its USX storage-agnostic software-defined storage technology in the field, Kleyman said. "Atlantis, with USX and HyperScale, is building the data center of the future, all with no hardware dependencies," he said.

Using Supermicro servers, the Atlantis HyperScale CX-12 with four nodes and a total of 12 TBs of usable flash capacity lists for about $78,000. The CX-24, with four nodes and a total of 24 TBs of usable flash capacity, lists for about $145,000. Customers can add more RAM to the server nodes to increase performance and capacity, Venkatesh said.