Mountain View, CA-based Atlantis Computing, which makes solutions that optimize virtual storage, has announced the release of a significant new bundle, Atlantis ILIO for Virtual SAN.

“Atlantis makes a 100% software-only solution that is hypervisor-resident,” said Greg Holzrichter, vice president of global marketing at Atlantis Computing. “It intercepts all IOs coming from virtual machines, and applies data services to it inline. It is fueled by server memory so it’s very fast. It provides 10x better performance of VMs and uses 90% less storage.” They have deep partnerships with Citrix, and VMware, as well as other major vendors like IBM, Dell and NetApp. Cisco is an investor in the company.

Atlantis ILIO was the company’s original flagship solution, and focuses on desktop virtualization, which was a natural place for a company making a virtual storage acceleration solution to start, because the IO blender effect is strongest on the desktop. ILIO accelerates both Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View VDI deployments by reducing cost of virtual desktops to less than of a PC, while making them perform faster than a PC.

This spring, the company launched Atlantis ILIO USX, which can handle any virtualized workload.

“The ILIO flagship desktop solution has been our leading solution for VDI and virtualized XenApp, but at this stage of the company, moving forward USX, will be the flagship,” Holzrichter said.  “We aim to do for storage what VMware ESX did for servers. We see ourselves as the VMware of storage. It’s grandiose but  the parallels are apt. Many vendors didn’t want to embrace server virtualization at first because they sold fewer boxes, but the market changed so that if you didn’t bring server virtualization into the deal, you wouldn’t win the deal. We are starting to see that now, where if you don’t bring us into a deal you will find it harder to compete.”

While USX will be the new flagship, strong opportunities still remain in the virtual desktop space, and here is where Atlantis ILIO for Virtual SAN comes in.

“This is a very exciting announcement for us,” Holzrichter said. “VMware has been educating the market on software defined storage and they have a very big microphone. We showed Horizon running on VSAN has five times better performance and reduces the amount of disk used by 80%. We have  had several conversations before, discussing a bundle in the channel, and that’s what this product is all about.”

This is the first such specialty bundle Atlantis has put together.

“It is a new route to market for us,” Holzrichter said. “We are tuning this and creating a unique offer, and we are offering pricing of ILIO here at $50 per desktop. That’s very aggressive compared to our  normal pricing of about $100 per desktop.”

Holzrichter said that they expect this offering will really drive Horizon sales, and that it won’t be a niche product.

“The intention is this will really accelerate adoption and make VDI really affordable,” he said. “We are really excited to drive this together with VMware.”

Atlantis ILIO for Virtual SAN will be available from joint channel partners of the two vendors. 92% of Atlantis’ business goes through the channel, and Ingram Micro is their distributor in North America.

“We are very channel focused,” Holzrichter said. “We have over 200 channel partners now and that’s growing very quickly.”

This story was originally posted on eChannelLine.