V5 of Sanbolic Melio Software

Sanbolic, Inc. announced the availability of its Melio version 5 (Melio5) software – delivering distributed scale-out, HA and enterprise data services through software.

Server-side flash has seen rapid adoption for applications such as hyperscale web serving, but limited adoption in general purpose enterprise applications. With Melio5, Sanbolic enables enterprise customers to improve their storage infrastructure economics by enabling server-side flash, SSD and HDD as primary persistent storage.

Melio5 aggregates across nodes for scale-out and availability while providing RAID, remote replication, QoS, snapshots and systems functionality through a software layer on commodity hardware. This provides customers with the ability to deploy commodity and server-based storage architecture with similar economics and flexibility as public cloud data centers such as Google and Facebook.
 
With validation by hundreds of enterprise and government organizations running in production, Melio volume management and file system technology addresses the needs of performing cost effective storage infrastructure. Melio5’s architecture is designed to scale up to 2,048 nodes and up to 65,000 storage devices enabling linear performance scalability in a cluster.
 
It also eliminates the need to deploy a redundant flash caching layer in front of legacy SAN hardware by directly incorporating flash into hybrid volumes and intelligently placing data based on file system access profiles. A hybrid volume will place random access data such as file system metadata on flash sectors while placing sequential data on low cost HDD drives to reduce the cost of capacity. The result is a scalable, performance storage system, with a lower cost than legacy storage arrays.
 
"Typically, server and disk drive vendors operate on gross margins in the 20-30% range. Storage array vendors, on the other hand, are often twice that or more," said Eric Slack, senior analyst, Storage Switzerland. "Sanbolic’s approach leverages the architecture that the big social media and public cloud companies use, to fix this problem. By replacing storage arrays (and storage array margins) with commodity server and disk drive hardware and enabling it with intelligence through software, companies can reduce storage infrastructure costs."
 
Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), stated: "Sanbolic’s Melio5 software, enables corporate users to take advantage of flash and SSD in conjunction with commodity hardware to create an intelligent, cost effective, and high performance storage architecture like the huge public cloud companies run, while still ensuring enterprise workload scalability and HA."
 
"Melio5 lets us to solve one of the biggest challenge for our customers today – the upfront and management cost for storage – without sacrificing systems capability or performance. The Lego-like modular capability of Melio allows our customers to scale-out their storage and servers based on off-the-self commodity components, without downtime," said Mattias Tornblom, CEO, EnvokeIT AB.
 
"LSI and Sanbolic’s shared vision and complementary products help customers to dramatically improve the performance, flexibility and economics of their on-premise storage infrastructure," said Brent Blanchard, senior director of WW channel sales and marketing, LSI Corporation. "LSI’s Nytro family of server-side flash acceleration cards and leading SAS-based server storage connectivity solutions, in combination with Sanbolic Melio5 software, will enable customers to deploy integrated and highly scalable, high-performance storage solutions to meet the challenges of exponential data growth and increased application availability."    
 
"By utilizing high performance commodity storage devices Melio5 scales linearly, provides systems level availability, and 650,000 IO/s per server," said Momchil ‘Memo’ Michailov, co-founder and CEO, Sanbolic. "Software enabled storage with this level of performance is disruptive to legacy vendors by allowing our enterprise customers to leverage flash, SSD server-side architecture, together with high capacity HDDs, to create a scalable infrastructure, with Web 2.0 economics."