U.S. Department of Energy Selects Atrato

Atrato, Inc. announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has deployed sixteen Atrato Velocity1000 (V1000) systems in its Golden Field Office, to support implementation of its newly virtualized data center. As part of a new green initiative, the Golden Field Office is constructing the data center of the future, powered 100% by solar energy. The Atrato Velocity1000 systems were chosen to provide unmatched power efficiencies and to keep pace with the performance hungry VMware environment.

DOE’s Golden facility leads the effort to develop the National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus to satisfy DOE’s need for world-class research and development. The new facility employs a zero footprint design where each individual workstation consumes only 60 watts of power per hour, including computer, lighting, heat and electricity. To advance this initiative, DOE set up a virtual desktop and virtual server environment that will grow to support up to 700 workstations and several thousand remote users during 2010. The Atrato V1000 systems are housed to provide a robust storage backend, helping DOE to overcome the bottleneck constraints of traditional disk storage.

"In a VMware environment, extremely high performance storage is needed to efficiently operate a growing virtual network," stated DOE’s Information Systems Security Manager. "In our experience, traditional systems have had difficulty sustaining the performance levels needed to efficiently manage peak loads and I/O bursts symptomatic of VMotion actions and a growing desktop infrastructure, transplanting server based I/O bottlenecks to the storage layer. Atrato avoids creating storage bound I/O by delivering a solution uniquely architected for high IOPS and throughput that measures five times faster at the application level than the traditional arrays we’ve tested."

With the V1000 systems, DOE found a scalable solution that efficiently meets the aggressive performance demands of a virtualized environment. With over 838TB of data, the Atrato architecture delivers high access density (low latency) by integrating more spindles (high spindle density) in a smaller footprint. This eliminates the need for workarounds such as drive short stroking which creates significant over-purchasing of capacity. The highly dense form factor delivers significant savings in power, cooling (60% to 80% reduction) and data center space (50%+ savings), helping to lower DOE’s total operating costs.

"The US Department of Energy has constructed the data center of the future, and sets an admirable green standard for all data centers wishing to harness the benefits of true green," stated Steve Visconti, Atrato president and CEO. "We are honored to be selected as the standard in storage arrays. It’s a great testament to our high density, extreme performance solutions. Atrato is committed to continuing our efforts with DOE to further their goals in energy conservation and innovation."