Atlantis Computing is integrating its software-defined storage (SDS) software with Citrix Director, Studio and Lifecycle Manager to combine applications, management and infrastructure into a unified workspace platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution. The expanded partnership, Atlantis says, will make it easier for small to large enterprises to deploy and manage virtual workspaces.

Based on similarities between workspace management and the container space, Atlantis also announced a new partnership with Rancher Labs to marry Atlantis management of storage and compute with Rancher orchestration of containers.

The integration of the Atlantis management platform with Citrix is designed to provide single-pane management for automated, dynamic workspace provisioning, monitoring and analytics-based reporting. Customers can extend workspace management to public clouds with integration of Microsoft Azure. They can also deploy the new workspace infrastructure platform in either Atlantis USX SDS or HyperScale appliance configurations.

Atlantis says it's trying to simplify workspace management by collapsing different tools together based on application needs. 

"Businesses require software-driven infrastructure that automatically tailors itself to the application to compete and thrive," said Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and president of Atlantis. "The workspace today is too much of a jigsaw puzzle of multiple tools and processes in separate IT silos. By folding Atlantis into the Citrix platform and delivering a vision for workspace PaaS, we're simplifying adoption of virtual desktops and providing cloud-based deployment management and operations that behaves more like a Docker container than a virtual machine."

Atlantis also believes this unified management approach can pay off dividends in the container market.  Containers are convenient for rapid creation of web applications and microservices; however, containers need data management tools and storage that lasts beyond the typical container lifecycle. Atlantis plans to work with Rancher to extend the Atlantis SDS platform to deploy and manage containerized applications and microservices together with enterprise-class data services for any environment.

"The power of workspace data services with a container strategy is very powerful - I can't believe I didn't think of it myself," said Scott D. Lowe, co-founder and principal analyst at ActualTech Media. "By integrating storage services into one tool that's used to manage data and applications within containers, enterprises can easily transition to hybrid or public clouds and combine VDI and container management."

The new Atlantis workspace solutions integrated with Citrix Desktop Director will be available from Atlantis resellers in November 2016. Citrix Lifecycle Manager and Studio will be integrated in later releases.

Atlantis is also offering a preview of workspace and container management in a new Atlantis USX Community Edition from the Atlantis Community site.