Waltham, Mass.-based Sanbolic today released version 5.5 of its Melio storage software platform with new features that make the case for broader adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs) and other flash-based storage solutions.
Despite tumbling prices, flash storage still commands a premium, relegating it largely to accelerating databases in enterprise IT environments, according to the company. With Melio 5.5, Sanbolic wants all sorts of applications to benefit from the performance boost provided by speedy SSDs.
The storage software platform enables enterprises “to balance ‘price to capacity’ ratios in ways that have never before been possible” by combining data and storage management across traditional, disk-based storage and flash devices at the host layer, claims the company. As a result, Melio 5.5, which runs on commodity server and storage hardware, “ultimately creates a much larger total available market for flash adoption.”
It’s not the first time Sanbolic has set its sights on flash storage. Last year, the company launched its Latency Target Allocator (LTA), a software module that extended Melio’s storage management embrace to SSDs, PCIe flash caching cards and hard drives (HDDs).
And that flash can be put through its paces on a massive scale. Melio 5.5 supports up to 2,048 nodes and 65,000 storage devices per server cluster, informed the company.
Sanbolic’s intelligent data placement technology auto-detects flash storage components and SSDs, allowing IT shops to tier data on a policy-driven basis. Write Once Read Many (WORM) ensures the integrity of crucial data.
The software now sports new writable snapshot capabilities. The feature allows organizations to run “analytics and non-clustered applications over the same data,” boasted the company. Other features include online split-able RAID 1/10, dynamic volume expansion and improved automated Quality of Service (QoS) tools that enforce I/O-based service level agreements (SLAs) for applications, workloads and devices.
“Our software-defined data acceleration platform eliminates the bottlenecks between applications and data to make that data more accessible, agile and useful,” said Sanbolic CEO Momchil Michailov in a statement. Noting that his company’s software works on commodity server and storage systems, “it can intelligently orchestrate storage and optimize the management of data across all devices and environments,” he added.
Dragon Slayer Consulting principal analyst Marc Staimer said in prepared remarks that Melio 5.5 “raises the bar in scale-out performance, simplicity, manageability and capacity. Touting Sanbolic’s “complete embrace of commodity servers and storage media,” he concluded that the platform can serve as a foundation for enterprise-grade, cloud-like storage architectures “at a TCO they can afford.”