Sanbolic Improves its Melio Clustered File System

Watertown, Massachusetts-based Sanbolic recently announced the addition of new distributed locking components to its Melio clustered file system, which blocks objects such as virtual disk files and databases.

 

The addition allows high performance direct I/O on SAN infrastructure and the capability to support very large clusters of host machines for virtualized cloud infrastructure. The company has also added support for shared host access to a LUN for Windows Server 2008 R2 beta, which enables live migration for Hyper-V.

 

Sanbolic’s Melio FS also provides shared access to data on SAN storage from virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. The company points out that this capability has been available for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual machines since 2008.

 

Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic explained that the existing options for host clustering in virtual datacenters have limited scalability and performance. In addition to providing virtually unlimited cluster sizes, the new lock architecture in Melio provides native performance of the SAN storage infrastructure.

 

Because Melio FS also provides integrated storage I/O and transaction performance monitoring, as well as quality of service assignment by host, it enables administrators to better identify and manage any storage bottlenecks in their virtual infrastructure.

 

Sanbolic’s Melio File System is being used by Argeweb, a fast growing provider of domain registration and webhosting services in the Netherlands. Rueben van der Swan, IT Manager at Argeweb Netherlands found Sanbolic’s Melio File System simple to install and noted that it provides high performance shared access to files on a SAN from physical and virtual machines providing the same functionality as NAS systems, without the performance penalty.

 

According to van der Swan, this allows them to improve flexibility and efficiency in their hosting infrastructure where availability and high performance is needed.

 

Sanbolic also allows centralized configuration and assignment of logical storage volumes among the virtual servers by using LaScala Enterprise clustered volume manager. Both the Melio FS and LaScala clustered volume manager install on physical or virtual servers, and can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware.