Atlantis: That whole storage Holy Grail thing? We've only gone and DONE IT

Says USX combines VSAN/PSAN virtues

Blocks and Files When we said that storage nirvana would be the ability to have VSAN virtualised storage containers and physical SAN array resources managed by the same policy-driven software abstraction layer, we little imagined a software supplier would pop up and say: “We can do that.”

That's just about what El Reg storage desk wrote in this article here: Mystical VM-accelerating beast emerges from Atlantis.

Gregg Holzrichter, marketing veep of Atlantis Computing, points out that I wrote ILIO USX presents standard NFS or iSCSI volumes and "inserts transparently into existing virtualised data centres by deploying VMs that integrate with the hypervisor layer to present standard file and block-based storage to applications. It integrates with existing provisioning workflows and orchestration systems through REST APIs to enable automated policy-based provisioning.USX has an active-active HA scheme for recovery without data loss if there are VM or host failures. Optionally there is thin replication for use in disaster recovery, sending data to remote sites.”

So ILIO USX can unify VMware’s VSAN and physical arrays into a single resource.

He says ”now that VSAN pricing has been announced … we have done testing together with VMware Virtual SAN, and based on the VMware sizing calculator and Dell hardware list pricing we found:

• vSAN hardware for 500-user persistent VDI
• 6-nodes (tolerate 2 failed nodes)
• Density = 84 VMs per node/host
• Total SAS/SATA storage = 87 TB
• Total Flash storage = 8.7 TB
• Node Configuration
• • Dual Processor X 8 Core with RAM = 384 GB
  • Storage:
  • • 24 X 10K RPM SAS 1.2 TB
    • 1 X IODrive 2 Flash 2.41 TB
• Total cost per node = $44,740
• Total Cost of Hardware = $268,440
• Cost per user = $537

With Atlantis ILIO USX and VSAN:

• VSAN + ILIO USX H/W 500 user persistent VDI
• 6-node (tolerate 2 failed nodes)
• Density = 84 per node/host
• Total SAS/SATA Storage = 13TB (85 per cent dedup)
• Total Flash Storage = 1.3 TB
• Node Configuration:
• • Dual Processor X 8 Core with RAM = 384 GB
  • Storage:
  • • 4 X 10K RPM SAS 1.2 TB
    • 1X IODrive 2 Flash 785 GB
• Total Cost per node = $22,108
• Node configuration:
• Total Cost of Hardware = $132,648
• Total Cost = $366 (32 per cent cheaper)

The main points he wants to make are that USX allows vSAN to work with existing storage investments, you need less disk storage if you combine USX and VSAN and – at least according to the vendor – you spend less money. Sounds pretty appealing. If it appeals to you, then test out these two v1.0 products and see if what he says is true. ®