Atlantis Computing, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions company, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series C investment co-led by Partech International, El Dorado Ventures and Cisco Systems Inc. Atlantis intends to use the capital to fund sales growth, marketing activities and international expansion.

"Atlantis ILIO has had early success at large VDI customer deployments in reducing desktop virtualization CAPEX costs and improving the user experience by increasing virtual desktop performance. It's not surprising that Atlantis Computing has caught so much attention so early," said Nicolas El Baze, General Partner, Partech International.

Atlantis ILIO is a VDI storage and performance optimization solution that integrates with Citrix, VMware, Quest and other VDI offerings to cut storage costs, provide IT teams with more storage options and boost desktop performance. Atlantis ILIO is a unique and innovative IO virtualization technology that fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of VDI by intelligently optimizing how the Microsoft Windows operating system interacts with VDI storage.

"Desktop virtualization is one of the fastest growing technology sectors and has the potential to be even larger than server virtualization," said Nicolas El Baze, General Partner, Partech International. "We think that Atlantis Computing is going to play a key role in the growth of this market and be an essential part of every VDI deployment."

"While the potential of desktop virtualization is understood, the reality is that large-scale adoption has been slow in coming. IT organizations are struggling with two key barriers to server-hosted virtual desktops (VDI): storage CAPEX costs and user acceptance. If these challenges are overcome, organizations will be able to demonstrate the real ROI of desktop virtualization and the floodgates will open," said Rachel Chalmers, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software with The 451 Group.

"We are seeing a tremendous amount of demand from customers that have launched VDI pilots but have not been able to overcome the high upfront cost of VDI storage required to achieve the equivalent performance of a physical PC," said Bernard Harguindeguy, President & CEO of Atlantis Computing. "We have solved that problem in an innovative way that doesn't require changes to desktop images while giving customers more options in the selection of storage solutions."