I’ve written about Atlantis Computing a few times before, and last week Bob Davis and Patrick Brennan were nice enough to run me through what they’ve been up to recently. What I’m about to cover isn’t breaking news, but I thought it worthwhile writing about nonetheless.
Citrix Workspace
Atlantis have been focusing an awful lot on Citrix workspaces lately, which I don’t think is a bad thing.
End-to-End Visibility
The beauty of a heavily integrated solution is that you get great insights all the way through the solution stack. Rather than having to look at multiple element managers to troubleshoot problems, you can get a view of everything from the one place. This is something I’ve had a number of customers asking for.
- Single pane of glass for the entire virtual workspace infrastructure monitoring;
- Proactive risk management for workspace;
- Troubleshoot and identify workspace issues faster; and
- Save money on operational costs.
Reporting
People love good reporting. So does Citrix, so you’ve got that in spades here as well. Including:
- Detailed historical information;
- Proactive risk management;
- Trending infrastructure requirements; and
- Scaling with confidence.
On-demand Desktop Delivery
The whole solution can be integrated with the Citrix cloud offering, with:
- Elastic dynamic provisioning on-premises or in the cloud with one management platform;
- Rapid deployment of applications or desktops with simplified administration; and
- Easy provision of Desktop as a Service.
HPE Intelligent Edge
It wouldn’t be product coverage without some kind of box shot. Software is nothing without hardware. Or so I like to say.
Here’s a link to the product landing page. It’s basically the HPE Edgeline EL4000 (4-Node) with m510 cartridges
- M510 Cartridge: Intel Xeon D “Broadwell-DE” 1.7GHz – 16 cores w/ 128GB RAM
- Equipped with NVMe
- 4TB Effective Storage Capacity
It runs the full Citrix Stack: XenApp + XenDesktop + XenServer and was announced at Citrix Summit 2017.
Thoughts and Further Reading
I have a lot of clients using all kinds of different combinations to get apps and desktops to their clients. It can be a real pain to manage, and upgrades can be difficult to deliver in a seamless fashion. If you’re into Citrix, and I know a lot of people are, then the Atlantis approach using “full-stack management” certainly has its appeal. It takes the concept of hyperconverged and adds a really useful layer of integration with application and desktop delivery, doing what HCI has done for infrastructure already and ratcheting it up a notch. Is this mega-hyperconverged? Maybe not, but it seems to be a smarter way to do things, albeit for a specific use case.
If there’s one thing that HCI hasn’t managed to do well, it’s translate the application layer into something as simple as the infrastructure that it’s hosted on. Arguably this is up to the people selling the apps, but it’s nice to see Atlantis having a crack at it.
Atlantis aren’t quite the household name that SimpliVity or Nutanix are (yes I know households don’t really talk about these companies either). But they’ve done some interesting stuff in the HCI space, and the decision to focus heavily on VDI has been a good one. There’s a lot to be said for solutions that are super simple to deploy and easy to maintain, particularly if the hosted software platform is also easy to use. Coupled with some solid cloud integration I think the solution is pretty neat, at least on paper. You can read about the announcement here. Here’s a link to the solution brief. If you’d like to find out more, head to this site and fill out the form. I’m looking forward to hearing about how this plays out in the data centre.