Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can be a huge pain to administrate and manage. Performance, bandwidth, pure user dislike for thin clients: all of these problems have made large-scale VDI adoption much harder than vendors and IT would like it to be. Atlantis Computing has built itself around providing real performance and stability to large-scale VDI environments with software that enables users to overcome the performance bottlenecks and high cost of traditional storage solutions.

With its announcement this week, Atlantis is now extending that optimization to virtualized servers in the cloud. ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 software is purpose-built for storage-intensive applications delivered by remote virtualized servers. This is a big need: intensive applications-on-demand generate a lot of data per physical application server and they need to store it fast and efficiently. For some users, these demands have necessitated a move away from the centralized ease of shared storage back to direct-attached storage (DAS) in order to meet application servers’ storage performance needs. This is a move backwards from the economies of shared storage scaling and management ease.

Atlantis has provided ILIO FlexCloud to solve this problem. It enables providers to cost-effectively virtualize and accelerate storage processing, and its highly scalable architecture grows smoothly with additional users and larger data sets.

FlexCloud works with virtualization products from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The in-line product processes all storage IO traffic within the hypervisor first, identifying and deduping the data according to its application characteristics. FlexCloud also processes small randomized traffic into larger sequential blocks that are considerably easier on storage, and enables VM cloning on demand without copying data from physical storage.

Users can also configure FlexCloud to use server RAM as primary storage. This provides very fast and scalable storage virtualization for high performance application data, such as clustered applications with intense processing requirements and large data volumes. This approach cuts down dramatically on the amount of required physical storage and works with any type of storage including SAN, NAS, DAS; and works on disk or SSDs.

The end result is cloud flexibility, performance and scale. Just as Atlantis has helped optimize how VDI uses storage, they are now bringing their innovative technology to bear on similar storage challenges in the cloud, We hope that solutions like ILIO FlexCloud will help users to minimize, if not avoid, some of the storage-driven growing pains that many VDI customers have experienced first hand over the past few years.