Sanbolic Melio FS Provides High Availability and Live Migration

Sanbolic, Inc. announced Melio 2010 now supports creating Hyper-V clusters using internal storage on host servers.

Host servers can present internal storage to the network using an iSCSI target, such as the Microsoft Software ISCSI Target. Sanbolic’s Melio 2010 RAID capability will mirror the target across servers for availability and then create a shared storage volume on the iSCSI targets that can be concurrently accessed by multiple Hyper-V host servers. This enables Live Migration of virtual machines across physical servers using System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V native management, and allows the storage volume to remain available if one of the host servers fails, without the use of expensive SAN hardware.

Melio 2010 is a software suite built around a clustered file system and a clustered volume manager that provides concurrent shared access to SAN volume on any industry standard SAN hardware, or on internal storage presented as an ISCSI target. It also includes storage management features such as volume expansion on the fly, quality of service, and integration with Active Directory. Disaster recovery is enabled by a distributed VSS-based snapshot capability. Melio’s self-contained snapshot reduces the I/O overhead and provides better storage utilization. Asynchronous Mirroring, which enables high availability for internal host storage, will be available in mid-June. Melio 2010 is recognized by Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, Windows Failover Clustering, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which automatically configure a Sanbolic volume as an active-active storage resource, simplifying deployment.

"Hyper-V brings the benefits of server virtualization to SMB customers at a very low total cost of ownership," said Jim Schwartz, director of Solutions Marketing, Virtualization, Microsoft Corp. "Sanbolic’s software extends the benefits or highly available Hyper-V clusters to those customers who have not deployed SAN storage in their environment."

Sanbolic distributes its product solutions worldwide through a network of distributors, OEMs, VARs and system integrators.