Atrato Taps Mobile Drives For High-End Storage Gear
Company:
Headquarters: Westminster, Colo.
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: Velocity1000 high-speed, high-density storage array
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Channel Partners: 15 in North America
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider
Why You Should Care: Atrato promises top-speed storage systems that aren't overdistributed.
The Lowdown: Atrato designs and manufactures storage arrays aimed specifically at high-performance applications that require 24x7 access. The company's Velocity1000 array fits up to 160 500-GB hard drives, or 80 Tbytes, in a 3U rackmount space. That's getting close to 1 petabyte in a standard 42U rack, said Steve Visconti, president and CEO of Atrato.
Atrato uses mobile PC hard drives because of the low-power requirements -- 5 watts for a mobile drive vs. 13 watts for an enterprise drive when operating, Visconti said.
Atrato's technology addresses the main issue related to using mobile drives in a high-performance environment: reliability. Visconti said the mean time between failure of a mobile drive today is similar to that of an enterprise drive. The main difference is that enterprise drives have firmware and mechanical technologies to account for vibration caused by the rotation of multiple hard drives in a tight space. Atrato's software accounts for that rotational vibration and provides full disk analysis and failure analysis of drives without the need to remove them from the enclosure, he said. To back its claims, the company offers a three-year warranty on its products, with the option of extending it an additional five years.
Customers like the maintenance-free aspect and the high-speed backplane of the Velocity1000, said Todd Gray, president of Convergent Enterprise Solutions, an Atlanta-based solution provider.
"Atrato is one of the better partners we have," he said. "They're always there to support us. We're pleased with their service and response."
When the product was first launched about one year ago, the company focused on sales integrators and OEMs in the digital media market, including IPTV and video-on-demand customers, Visconti said. Since then, it has added solution providers working with preproduction and postproduction video customers, as well as integrators in the video surveillance market. It also works directly with customers in the social networking space, Visconti said.