Companies that seek to thrive in the world of Web 2.0 and entertainment-on-demand need to be able to provide high-volume, on-demand storage  to thousands of simultaneous users. The first product offering from Atrato Inc. promises to provide the necessary performance .
Atrato has launched the Velocity1000 (V1000) storage system . The company is addressing a major challenge to high-performance IT environments -- not more storage, but rather the speed at which data can be accessed.
"It solves a fairly unique problem" for companies that have large stores of data, according to Henry Baltazar, a storage analyst with The 451 Group. "It's hard to give random access to that data when you have thousands of people trying to get at that stream" at the same time.
At the core of Atrato's offering is a Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks (SAID) that can handle more than 11,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second, a performance measurement). Baltazar said this measurement might be more impressive than it sounds. Conventional arrays can deliver more I/Os than that -- but only for data stored in cache. Where the V1000 differs is that it can handle this many I/Os for data served from its disks.
"If you can cache the data set, hundreds of thousands of I/Os are not out of line," Baltazar told us. "But if 3,000 people want to watch Lost at the same time, that's a very different problem."
SAID Architecture
The SAID architecture crams 100 to 200 2.5-inch hard drives into a small chassis, offering as much as 50 terabytes of storage at high-performance rates. Baltazar said the chassis can be optimized for either higher spindle counts or for capacity.
Atrato says this architecture is the solution that IT managers are seeking in other, less effective, ways.
"IT managers assume that by adding rack units, they will get the increased IOPS needed," noted Dan McCormick, cofounder and CEO of the company. "The reality is that over-allocating not only fails to deliver the expected performance gains, but also adds costly power - and space-intensive overhead to the data center."
Need for Partnerships
Baltazar said that the company has some strong competition for its target market, including IBM, EMC, Network Appliance and Dell, and while the company has just attracted $18 million in venture capital, it will likely have to use much of that on marketing and sales efforts to prove to potential customers that the SAID model is a viable one. He added that the company would have a better chance of success if it partners with large resellers and creates an OEM agreement with a major storage vendor. (continued...)
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