Computerworld - Sanbolic, which makes software for data sharing and file system management, today announced the release of Melio 3.5, a software suite that offers dynamic migration of storage volumes across heterogeneous storage arrays or servers.
The Melio software suite deploys across any storage or server infrastructure, allowing data sharing across physical machines. That can reduce the upfront costs of purchasing an additional storage array, according to Sanbolic CEO Momchil Michailov.
"Think about buying a [server] blade chassis, whether its Cisco, Dell or IBM, and then you can deploy a private cloud on it. So the upfront cost is down by $100,000 or $200,000 because you don't have to buy the upfront storage," Michailov said.
Melio 3.5 is a clustered file system and volume management suite that offers data snapshots for backup, Quality of Service mechanisms and automated data migration, Michailov said."We're moving into virtual and cloud workloads, from aggregation capability of storage on servers to scalability across a broad range of hypervisors," Michailov said.
Sanbolic's previous generation of Melio software supported only MIcrosoft's HyperV hypervisor. Melio 3.5 supports VMware, Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux servers.
Features of the Sanbolic software platform include the creation of a single, flexible storage pool from multiple servers or SAN storage arrays, centralized volume management, and shared read-write access to data on block storage for any Windows-based server workload.
For example, Michailov said, Cisco's Unified Computing System comes with 32TB of storage built in. Melio 3.5 allows that storage to be virtualized and spread across the system to create a single pool that can be shared by different applications.
"The core value of Melio 3.5 is that it brings increased applications availability and scalability of physical, virtual and cloud workloads," he said. "Ultimately, what people are looking for is improved flexibility and agility and this offers that."
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at 
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