Sanbolic Melio Cloud Enables Shared Storage Without SAN

Sanbolic, Inc. announced Melio Cloud software suite, which provides a shared block storage solution with no single point of failure using internal server storage.

The product is targeted at the cloud hosting market and will be available in December 2010 with a service provider licensing model. Melio allows hosters to provide a predictable and resilient, high performance and highly scalable storage platform for public cloud environments using existing server and network resources. The storage environment can be managed centrally and integrates with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center, and Windows-based server applications. Melio aggregates storage performance and can scale out to support large Hyper-V and virtual machine clusters as hosting environments grow.

Cloud hosting environments using Melio Cloud with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 have the ability to dynamically assign storage resources for virtual machines and application data. Melio Cloud provides concurrent access to storage volumes from multiple Hyper-V hosts and/or Windows applications running on virtual machines. This enables migration of workloads between physical hosts, dynamic scale out of workloads, and high availability. Performance monitoring and application-aware quality of service management allow cloud hosting providers to guarantee customers service-level agreements and to charge for storage bandwidth utilized by customers on the shared storage platform.

Melio Cloud 2010 is recognized by Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, which automatically configure a Sanbolic volume as an active-active storage resource, simplifying deployment. Melio Cloud provides reporting on performance and utilization that can be used with the Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hoster infrastructure to create monitoring and billing tools in hosting environments.

"Cloud hosting is fundamentally changing the economics of storage," said Momchil Michailov, a founder and CEO of Sanbolic. "We are responding to customer interest in efficiently utilizing all of their storage assets, whether SAN or DAS, as a shared, dynamically assignable resource."

"As providers seek to achieve agility and efficiency in service delivery, we recognize that they require added flexibility and control to cost effectively meet the needs of their customers," said Dai Vu, director of solutions marketing in the Windows Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. "Melio Cloud enables service providers to utilize existing server and network infrastructure to deploy a solution providing dynamic assignment of storage for Hyper-V servers from a shared storage pool while supporting service-level agreements and integrating easily with billing systems."

Sanbolic distributes its product solutions worldwide through a network of distributors, OEMs, VARs and system integrators. Evaluation software can be downloaded on the company’s web site.