Atrato’s Virtualization Software Dynamically Aligns IT Resources

Atrato, Inc., provider of high-volume on-demand storage for the digital media, entertainment, Web 2.0 and high performance computing (HPC), announced a software platform and roadmap that leverage autonomic intelligence to cost-effectively optimize data center resources and take the guess-work out of managing growing data center demands. The company’s next-generation Atrato Virtualization Software (AVS) is the foundation for its Velocity1000 (V1000) tiered storage line. AVS includes ApplicationSmart technology that extends the platform’s existing self-maintaining and self-healing autonomic features with advanced self-optimization capabilities. Atrato AVS and ApplicationSmart automatically determine application requirements and balance workloads among storage tiers, ensuring ideal alignment of infrastructure with business needs.

Data storage and access demands are growing at an unprecedented rate due to the rise in bandwidth- heavy and information content rich applications. Storage options are growing too, as disk-based storage improves and solid state drives (SSDs) decrease in price. Yet user demands and workloads have become increasingly unpredictable, and applications have diverse performance profiles; it is all too easy to fall into the trap of buying too much or too little storage, or of striking an imperfect balance amongst storage tiers.

“Enterprises in the past have tried to overcome the scale and performance problem by throwing more storage at the problem—in other words more hardware acquisition and operational and maintenance dollars. However, given recent data growth and prevailing economic uncertainty, this approach has become untenable and has created demand for performance- and scale-optimized storage in the market,” according ThinkEquity’s recent report Think Technology: Data Storage & Networking: Innovating To Optimize In A Resource-Constrained World.

Atrato AVS brings an intelligent, tiered storage approach to the data center. Breakthrough ApplicationSmart software and tiered management optimize performance. The system detects access pattern changes to automatically balance resources and get the optimal performance required according to changing application and business needs. AVS helps companies manage data growth and high bandwidth requirements of today’s applications, while improving power efficiency and performance density in the data center.

“Data center storage has improved tremendously, yet the software has not kept pace,” said Steve Visconti, president and CEO of Atrato. “For example, the algorithms that govern cache management have changed little over the last fifty years and work only at the file level. We transcend old models of application-aware storage that required extensive integration between the application, OS and HBA with a more relevant architecture that dynamically learns, adapts, and manages movement of data at the LBA and block level. AVS is a natural progression of our work in autonomic computing, designed to take the complexity and cost out of multi-tiered management.”

About Atrato AVS and ApplicationSmart
Atrato Virtualization Software (AVS) delivers a fully automated tiered storage solution with new levels of storage virtualization and autonomic intelligence. AVS leverages commodity hardware for efficient use of widely available software (e.g., compression, encryption, and image processing). The platform offers zero disk maintenance with Fault Detection, Isolation, Recovery (FDIR), block and file level features, and multiple RAID level support.

ApplicationSmart provides a self-optimizing block-level solution that recognizes data access information and determines where to best store and retrieve data based on observed access patterns. When performance is paramount, managing by statistical data, rather than time, content, or perceived value, AVS optimizes performance of the storage subsystem. One of the most significant differences between the Atrato solution and others is the design of the ApplicationSmart algorithm for scaling to terabytes of Tier 0 utilizing SSD and petabytes of Tier 1 HDD storage.