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Atlantis Computing: CEO left due to 'personal reasons'

Business sets up partnership with Citrix

Comment Atlantis CEO Jason Donahue stepped down for personal reasons with no business-related issues at all, says the firm, which adds that it has set up a partnership with Citrix using its virty storage booster software USX.

Chetan Venkatesh, Atlantis’ founder and new CEO after Jason Donahue left just four months post-appointment, said Donahue had been a good CEO, things had been going really well and they were disappointed to lose him: “He’s a great guy. The timing was very unfortunate. In his short time he had a big impact.”

He said: “Jason decided he wanted to leave to focus on his personal side."

Atlantis’ business appears to be going well as “[w]e ended 2014 with it being our strongest year, [with] record revenues, and Q4 was our largest quarter to date.”

Why did Venkatesh take on the CEO role? “It intersected with my own progression. My palette of skills and motivation has grown."

Donahue was recruited to function as a kind of second-stage booster rocket, taking Atlantis into orbit and possible IPO. Continuing and progressing the momentum driven by Donahue will be Venkatesh's priority as the IT world looks closer at server speed and efficiency. He thinks USX is Atlantis' ace in the hole here – the fuel that it can use to escape startup gravity and get into orbit.

Citrix partnership

Atlantis has a partnership with Citrix focused on its USX software. This caches virtual machine storage I/O in server RAM to accelerate it and has been developed from its ILIO virtual desktop software which used the same technique.

USX works with VMware and also with Citrix’s XenServer hypervisor. USX is certified Citrix-ready on standard X86 servers. It “delivers a combined compute and storage platform with Atlantis HyperDup (deduplication) data services."

The pair say USX/XenServer can be “combined with Citrix XenDesktop or Citrix XenApp, the platform delivers a rich application experience, optional 3D virtual desktops and a total infrastructure cost per desktop as low as $187 per desktop including the server hardware, local flash storage and Atlantis USX software...” so cheaper than a PC.

Venkatesh says: “Targeting an aggressive cost point is a big deal for us [and] there is no vSphere tax. It’s easier for Citrix partners to sell.”

Atlantis says USX “automatically deploys the required Atlantis components to create a hyper-converged system. Unlike other hyper-converged appliances, Atlantis USX customers can combine different server and disk configurations using new or existing servers, as well as existing SAN/NAS storage.”

Hyperconverged systems came into being as single-SKU bundles of server HW, operating software, storage and networking, with Nutanix and Simplivity as startups espousing this idea and offering much simplified IT building blocks.

Citrix has just bought Sanbolic and its storage virtualisation software products and technology, Venkatesh thinks this is a very intelligent acquisition: “Citrix thinks of itself as an app company and Sanbolic is very app-oriented.”

He says VMware’s VSAN was a poster-child for hyperconvergence and, for Citrix, “We help them divorce themselves from the VMware stack and do it all on Citrix.”

The Atlantis/Citrix hyperconverged concept is essentially a software-only item with hardware added to it by Atlantis’ channel. It will be generally available through certified Atlantis solution partners on 30 January, 2015. ®

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