From Atlantis Computing, Converged Solution for End-to-End Citrix Environment

Atlantis Computing, Inc. announced the USX hyper-converged solution for Citrix Systems, Inc.‘s environments.

The solution has been verified as Citrix Ready on industry-standard x86 server platforms and integrates with the Xenserver open-source hypervisor platform. The USX hyper-converged solution delivers a combined compute and storage platform with HyperDup data services. The solution provides the simplicity of a hyper-converged appliance, performance of an all-flash array and flexibility to deploy on any standard server hardware.

When combined with XenDesktop or XenApp, the platform delivers a rich application experience, optional 3D virtual desktops and a total infrastructure cost per desktop $187 per desktop including the server hardware, local flash storage and USX software.

At the heart of the USX platform are patented HyperDup Content-Aware Data Services that leverage real-time deduplication technology to provide data reduction, IO acceleration, data management, data mobility, security and unified storage across all datacenter storage. Atlantis inline deduplication and IO acceleration technology enables customers to increase the storage capacity and performance by up to 10 times, delivering a superior user experience at up to 75% lower cost.

Atlantis USX provides:

• Simplicity – Automated deployment capabilities integrated with Xenserver to deploy hyper-converged systems on any x86 server hardware, drastically reducing the amount of time to deploy XenDesktop or XenApp.
• Cost reduction – All-flash performance and 4x the storage capacity of competitive hardware appliances at a 75% lower cost per gigabyte of storage.
• User experience – The performance of an all-flash array through HyperDup IO acceleration technology. Up to 90% of IO is processed in-memory lowering latency and increasing IO/s, providing an excellent user experience with near-instant session starts, fast application launches, and Outlook search capabilities.
• Scalability and hardware flexibility – The flexibility to use any x86 server platform including 4-node appliances, rack servers or blade servers – USX automatically deploys the required Atlantis components to create a hyper-converged system. Unlike other hyper-converged appliances, USX customers can combine different server and disk configurations using new or existing servers, as well as existing SAN/NAS storage.

Calvin Hsu, VP product marketing, desktop and apps, Citrix, said: “Citrix and our customers have been working with Atlantis for years to deliver high-performance and cost-effective storage solutions for virtual desktops. This Atlantis USX hyper-converged offering on Xenserver now provides our customers a simple and powerful hyper-converged solution with the storage and compute needed to deliver the best possible user experience while dramatically reducing costs.“

Eric Burgener, research director, IDC, said: “Atlantis is in a position that will increasingly benefit from several key enterprise storage trends, one of which is the burgeoning interest in hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Growing at almost 4 times the rate of traditional enterprise storage hardware, the hyper-converged segment has attracted a number of offerings from start-ups as well as more established companies. This offering from Atlantis and Citrix, however, will stand alone in the industry because of the way Atlantis USX uniquely leverages main memory to cut external storage requirements by up to 20x and provide high performance and very efficient enterprise data services.“

Manuel Martull, director, enterprise solutions marketing, SanDisk Corporation, said: “The fast adoption of SanDisk flash technology in x86 servers has now reached the point where customers can replace SAN or NAS solutions with local server flash. By working in conjunction with Atlantis USX, customers can now turn high-performance and cost-effective SanDisk enterprise flash solutions into mission-critical storage that delivers the performance of an All-Flash Array at half the cost of a SAN-delivering a very compelling solution for today’s budget conscious, resource constrained IT decision makers.“

Bill Kleyman, director strategy and innovation, Mtechnologies,Inc., said: “Ultimately, you’re creating pooling, abstraction, IO acceleration, and data mobility capabilities. You create distinct business and technology advantages by creating intelligent policies around data and workload optimization. Here’s the big point: what will matter in the near future is the cloud and data control layer. Software-defined storage technologies like USX allow for the direct abstraction of storage and help integrate powerful virtual-layer optimizations.“

The USX hyper-converged solution for Citrix environments will be available through certified Atlantis solution partners on January 30th, 2015.