Next-Generation of Atrato Velocity Series

Atrato, Inc., provider of high performance autonomic tiered storage for data-intensive applications such as virtual environments, virtual desktops (VDI), business and scientific analytics, data warehousing, and Web 2.0 applications, announced availability of its next-generation Atrato Velocity product line.

The Atrato solution delivers a unique blend of solid state disk (SSD) technology, the highest density spinning disk (HDD), and intelligent, software autonomics for precise real-time data access and management. The ‘hybrid’ solution is specifically designed to help customers bridge the gap between storage and servers, effectively solving the productivity challenge created by performance starved applications.

There are a number of conflicting challenges facing the storage user; for many, performance ranks number one. Because of an increasingly widening gap in performance between server (CPU) demand for I/O processing and the ability for storage to deliver, many applications have become I/O bound and unable to service the demands of high performance applications. Companies with data-intensive environments are looking for a storage solution that can effectively deliver the high velocity data to satisfy server demands and optimize the storage environment. With Atrato’s Hybrid Velocity Series, the right combination of HDD and SSD is applied, providing fast access for a full spectrum of I/O workloads. Autonomic software dynamically manages data, replicating the most active data to SSD for increased access speed. This distinctive product offering eliminates the I/O bottleneck between the storage and server, ensuring data is readily available to the application.

"At Atrato we set out to deliver on the promise of application acceleration through high access tiers," notes Bill Mottram, Vice President of Marketing at Atrato. "We succeed where others have failed by providing the best mix of SSD/HDD, and tightly integrated intelligent tiered management software to place high velocity data in the correct tier, where it’s needed most. Our software eliminates the management complexity and delivers a solution that transparently and continuously adapts to any data load and application."

"SSD technology significantly improves storage system performance and throughput when strategically deployed," said April Adams, Research Director at Gartner, "and the economics of SSD technology are greatly improved with automated tiering."

"The Atrato solution provides a win-win for our customers, providing a cost-effective solution that delivers the enterprise scale and performance required to thrive in a fiercely competitive market," said Steve Visconti, president and CEO, Atrato, Inc. "IT administrators continue to manually manage increasingly complex distributed environments as performance starved applications become larger, and more demanding of performance capabilities. Atrato provides precise autonomic tiering to minimize complexity while optimizing the storage environment, delivering a solution that fits seamlessly within their existing environment."

Atrato ApplicationSmart, Tiered Management Highlights:

Hardware Features:

• SSD enclosure – accelerates performance with solid state disk, featuring 10x the performance of spinning disk; Atrato Velocity series delivers 1.5TB per 1U, with the ability to scale to petabytes.
• SAID – highest density spinning disk boosts I/O performance and provides cost-effective storage on the backend. 160 drives deliver higher access density, increased capacity (80TB system), and significantly smaller footprint.
• High-Speed Connectivity – for seamless integration into existing data centers, the Velocity series supports Fibre Channel (FC) and 10Gb iSCSI. Provides SAN target access for Linux, Windows and Solaris clients.

Software Features:

• ApplicationSmart – autonomic software optimizes management of storage tiers.
• Access Profiler – optimizes tiering for each customer’s unique application. Software identifies I/O access patterns and changes; re-evaluates patterns in real-time.
• TME (Tiered Management Engine) – removes the complexity of managing storage tiers. Intelligent block management replicates the most frequently accessed blocks to SSD.
• SLM (SSD LUN Manager): simplifies management of storage pool, including hybrid SSD+HDD. Controls application specific meta-data, database indexes, or other file-level uses of Tier 0 to enhance performance.
• IA (Ingest Accelerator): accelerates writes, segregating write operations from read I/Os and offloading the process of transferring data to spinning disk. Log structured ingest, optimizes writes by reforming I/O commands.
• EA (Egress Accelerator): bursts sequential I/O reads. Similar to read-ahead cache, EA automatically identifies sequential I/Os and buffers for lower latency sequential read-out.