Chetan Venkatesh: Founder and CTO of Atlantis Computing

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atlantis computing centered2Interview with founder and CTO Chetan Venktatesh
Date: 20 August 2014
Atlantis Crunchbase Profile

In succession to the interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy I had the pleasure to speak with the CTO of Atlantis, Chetan Venkatesh.

As the founder of Atlantis, he provided great background to Atlantis. Enjoy the interview!

Willem ter Harmsel: Can you run me through the genesis of Atlantis Computing?

Chetan Venkatesh: Chetan VenkateshI can! I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life and started Atlantis in 2006. I spent a lot of time in the datacenter, storage and Infrastructure space. I was keen to to explore the software that was on the server side to do something intelligent with storage.

We had Moore’s law deliver twice the horsepower at half the cost. I was inspired to create a storage model that took advantage of these increasing CPU cycles and RAM on the server side.

I wanted to bring data services like de-duplication and compression, that require a lot of CPU power, right next to the application.

(Smiling) It turns out that this is much harder idea to implement in practice than said. It took us almost 3 years to complete the first version of the product and we launched in 2009.
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Atlantis Computing, the road toward USX. Interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy

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atlantis computing centered2Interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy
Date: 3 July 2014
Atlantis Crunchbase Profile

I had the opportunity to speak with the original founder and CTO of Atlantis Computing, Chetan Venkatesh, and the CEO and chairman of the board Bernard Harguindeguy.

Both Bernard and Chetan have extensive experience in the datacenter space and were passionate about creating an optimal storage platform that solved many of the challenges their customers struggled with.

Read my interview with founder and CTO Chetan Venkatesh

Data storage solutions are typically sold as appliances; hardware with a smart software layer on top. The intelligence is in the box that you buy and is tailored to the hardware it lives with.

That approach makes sense until you take a wide-angle view on a real-world datacenter: independent storage boxes act well on their own, but are hard to aggregate into one centrally controlled storage pool. The result is that storage capacity is not used optimally and storage performance is hard to control.

There are several approaches to solving this problem, Atlantis Computing offer a software-only solution that places all intelligence in one hardware independent software layer. That means customers can run Atlantis USX on their existing server, network and storage hardware and control all types of storage centrally from one software layer.

Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 10.38.52

Atlantis’ USX solution investigates the physical infrastructure it lands on and offers customers suggestions for various types of storage setups. Depending on the application requirements the customer can pick the recommended setup and tweak settings.
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Storage Startup popularity on Google Trends

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I was just playing around with Google Trends. A great tool to compare search popularity between search terms.

How much impact storage startups really have on the market is hard to pin down, but the search popularity of individual brand names does provide some perspective.

Below, I compared worldwide search popularity between Storage Startups over the last 6 years. I looked at three groups; Boxed Storage, Software-only Storage and Server-side Caching Solutions. Then to put the Startup scene in some perspective I compared the most popular of each group to storage giants EMC and Netapp.

Boxed Storage: Nutanix, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri, Skyera


Boxed Storage [Read more…]

Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

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MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
Date: 18 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

In this article, I interview Yoram Novick, the CEO of Maxta Storage.

Maxta

A short introduction to Maxta based on my introductory article of last week.

Maxta offers a software storage solution, that creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The solution works by installing their software on each of the servers you want to include and Maxta creates a storage pool across them.

Read my interview with the CTO of Atlantis Computing, another player in the Software Defined Storage space

Magnetic disks are leveraged for capacity and flash is used as a caching layer, with the capability of accelerating both reads and writes. For speed and redundancy, the software replicates writes between the server flash of different hosts, and de-stages to magnetic disks later.

I interviewed Yoram Novick to learn more about Maxta and his views on the storage market
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