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    Sanbolic Turns Server-Side Storage into a Shared Resource

    With a wider variety of storage technologies than ever running directly on servers, the time has come for IT organizations to find a way to manage them all as one logical resource.

    Sanbolic today began shipping Melio5, storage management software that Sanbolic CEO Momchil “Memo” Michailov says allows Flash memory, solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard drives on a server to act as a persistent set of primary storage resources that can be shared by multiple applications.

    Michailov says Flash memory and SSDs are too expensive to dedicate to a single application. IT organizations need to be able to treat those resources on the server as a shared resource in order to justify the investments.

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    Melio5, says Michailov, will change the economics of storage by allowing IT organizations to apply RAID, remote replication and quality of Service (QoS) snapshots to server-side storage resources. That cluster of storage resources, says Michailov, can scale up to 2,048 nodes encompassing 65,000 storage devices to provide linear performance scalability in a cluster.

    Michailov says Melio5 also includes the ability to include Flash memory with a hybrid volume, which means IT administrators can allocate resources based on file system access profiles. For example, random access data such as file system metadata will be placed on Flash, while sequential data will be place on low-cost hard disk drives.

    That approach, adds Michailov, eliminates single points of failure on servers, while allowing IT organizations to transparently scale out server-side storage investments over time.

    The Flash wars are rapidly moving into a software phase that will be marked by multiple approaches to sharing expensive Flash memory resources. The good news is that, from an IT perspective, software is emerging that finally provides a much-needed way to manage server-side storage like any other shared storage resource.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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