OpenDrives’ Atlas: Driving Award-Winning Innovation

OpenDrives has had a compelling journey marked by early innovation, company transformation, and reinvention, which reflects our path of growth and resilience.

We started as a high-performance network-attached storage solution provider built by media professionals for media professionals. Catering specifically to post-production and creative workflows with a focus on ultra-low latency and high throughput, we offered what traditional enterprise storage couldn’t.

Today, some of the most forward-thinking companies in media, entertainment, pro-sports, and enterprise media IT rely on our Atlas software-defined storage platform to power the most demanding environments and help them collaborate on and complete creative projects, including movies, video content, commercials, and live broadcasts.

The year 2025 has been a banner one for OpenDrives. Despite the media and entertainment industry experiencing major setbacks, we held the most successful NAB Show in our company’s history and managed to win major recognition for Atlas. This year, we took home three industry awards, which was an incredible honor that deserves reflection on the road that got us here.

Atlas didn’t become what it is overnight. It’s been a work in progress, shaped by real feedback from customers and partners, lessons learned along the way, and a lot of iteration. The journey hasn’t always been easy, but every challenge has helped us build something smarter and more in tune with the people who use it.

And we’re not done. Atlas keeps evolving because our customers do.

There’s no shortage of data storage platforms out there. But here’s what’s resonating with our customers and why Atlas keeps earning attention:

• Composable Software Feature Bundles: Enterprise storage and data management features that you need. Skip what you don’t. Whether you’re in the mid-market or building enterprise-scale resource-intensive workflows, there’s a version of Atlas that fits.
• The Atlas Performance Engine: Speed isn’t a feature — it’s a foundation.
• Unlimited Capacity Pricing: One, flat license fee. No surprises. Scale your storage, not your costs.
• Freedom of Choice: A growing lineup of certified hardware options so you’re never boxed in. Interoperable flexibility at its finest with open source and containerization.

This isn’t theoretical. We have worked side by side with our users to refine Atlas into something that flexes with the real demands of modern media.

Atlas: Award-Winning Innovation

We’re proud of the awards. But what we’re really proud of is why we won them: because we’re building a platform that people actually want to use.

In 2025, Atlas brought home:

• NAB Product of the Year (Cloud Computing & Storage) — Our fourth win in a row, which says a lot about staying power.
• TV Tech’s Best of Show Award — Judged by engineers and media experts who know what makes a platform valuable.
• CRN Storage 100 (Software-Defined Storage) — A third straight year recognizing our innovation and customer-first approach.

Read the press release to learn more about the awards Atlas won.

Why Atlas?

We live in a hybrid world. Your teams are remote. Your workloads are in motion. In this world storage should be an enabler and not a barrier. Whether you’re managing terabytes or petabytes, on-premises or hybrid, Atlas is designed to keep up. The core of Atlas is storage performance designed to adapt to you, and what stands out is how we’ve packaged that power. Our composable software bundles — Professional and Comprehensive — make it easier to scale without hidden fees or vendor lock-in.

• Creators and post teams get faster access to media — no more waiting for data to catch up to your ideas.
• IT teams get the tools to manage, scale, and monitor performance — without getting buried in complexity.
• Pricing is predictable — transparent pricing that won’t balloon as your data grows.

We’re also about modularity and openness. “Free Your Data” isn’t just a catch phrase, it’s one of our guiding principles, and our message that we’re committed to giving you is complete control over where and how your data lives. It also means decoupling software from hardware, making your infrastructure agile and giving you the flexibility to install building blocks to fit your specific needs.

Evolving something like Atlas takes more than a strong product roadmap. Every part of Atlas has been shaped with real-world media workflows in mind. It’s always been about making your work easier, faster, and more flexible. It takes listening, iterating, and a willingness to admit when we need to shift. Here’s what some of our team members had to say about what makes Atlas special:

Sean Lee – CEO: The evolution of our products like Atlas mirrors our organization’s deep commitment to providing the business outcomes our customers need. We build data storage software around principles of open standards and protocols, which generate outcomes for our customers that include broader interoperability, increased flexibility to adapt and scale, and of course no vendor lock-in, ever. To keep evolving like this, you must listen to your customers.

Trevor Morgan – COO: We built our business early on by providing highly performant software. And Atlas has gone through many evolutions to get where it is now. However, customer environments are way more complex than they were just a few short years ago, so on top of industry-leading performance, which Atlas has been known for, we’re now trying to solve a whole new set of problems for our customers: achieving cloud-native-style resiliency even on-premises, perfecting scale-out architecture to complement our scale-up proficiency, and supporting more data services than just storage. We can’t wait to show off what’s new!

Jason Matousek – Director, Market Programs: What drives us forward is our mission to help our users solve critical data problems that unlock revenue and push the boundaries of what can be accomplished — whether that be through advanced creative expression or building revenue-generating workflows. Our users are constantly innovating, and they choose OpenDrives solutions like Atlas because they know we’re problem solvers that deliver the performance, cost-predictability, scalability, and flexibility they need to achieve whatever they set their minds to do.

OpenDrives built Atlas to solve the kinds of storage problems traditional systems couldn’t. It’s grown through constant feedback and a deep understanding of how creative and technical teams actually work. The result? A platform that’s fast, flexible, and built to evolve, just like the people who use it.

To learn more about Atlas,  you can download the fact sheet and request a demo.

Watch our product explainer video to see which OpenDrives product is right for you: Atlas or Astraeus.