Startup Atrato Claims IOPS Breakthrough

Startup Atrato stepped out of stealth today with the launch of its V1000 disk array, which it is touting as the solution to users' spiraling data needs.

By packing the three-rack-unit-high array full of 2.5-inch laptop SATA drives, as opposed to traditional 3.5-inch storage drives, the vendor claims to offer an extremely high level of IOPs in random read/writes.

"You can get up to 50 Tbytes of raw capacity and in excess of 11,000 IOPs in the same space," says Dan McCormick, the vendor's founder and CEO, explaining that Atrato has also built its own software to manage these drives.

"We have the ability to get fully inside the drives and understand," adds the CEO, alluding to Atrato's Self-maintaining Array of Identical Disks (SAID) technology.

More precisely, this is a form of virtualization software which can reformat problem drives and also "remap" working parts of a failed drive, ensuring that data is still written to it.Up until now users looking for this level of I/O performance have typically opted for Solid State Disk technology, although that technology comes at a price premium, according to Russ Fellows, senior analyst at the Evaluator Group.

"The V1000 fits between SSDs and traditional storage," he says. "It's faster access than traditional storage, but not as expensive as SSDs... This is for any applications that have very high random I/O writes such as financial applications and OLTP databases. This could also be used for workloads like streaming multiple video feeds and capturing video from high-definition video cameras."

Atrato would not reveal specific pricing for the V1000, which is available now, although McCormick says that prices will start "in the low six figures."

The CEO adds that the technology is aimed at high performance computing (HPC), digital entertainment, and Web 2.0 environments, although the exec was unable to name any of the startup's handful of early adopters.

"We rely heavily on the systems integrator channel with some direct sales," says McCormick, adding that Atrato has around a dozen SIs signed up, although only one of these, SRC Computers, has been made public.Named after the fast-flowing Atrato river in western Colombia, the startup was founded by former Xiotech execs McCormick and Jonathan Hall in early 2004, and has since amassed a little over $18 million in funding.

The CEO says that Atrato's main competition is from traditional storage vendors such as EMC and IBM, something which represents a major hurdle for a firm with only 45 employees.

"For any up-and-coming vendor, it's all about being able to get their word out," says Fellows. "I don't think that they have any looming technical challenges, it's more about marketing and making sure that they are known."

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