products

Sanbolic’s products have been designed to enable customers to easily manage SAN storage as a single pool of data that can be accessed by multiple servers concurrently. This greatly reduces storage complexity and gives users much more flexibility in how they can access their data. The design point for these products was a large telecom network operation center application running multiple operating systems. The product architecture has been designed to support multiple operating systems and storage hardware platforms in a very large environment demanding very high reliability. Sanbolic software for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 platforms are available today. Even with their extensive capabilities, our products are exceptionally easy to install and use. They can be used with any industry standard iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage.

Sanbolic has recently introduced new products that leverage the active-active storage access enabled by the clustered file system in providing application-level failover or load balancing clustering (AppCluster), as well as centralized configuration of shared-data file serving clusters (FilerScaler).

See diagram of product deployment

Melio FS

Melio FS is a symmetrical clustered file system designed for enterprise and high performance storage environments. Melio FS includes advanced locking mechanisms for concurrent shared access to data on a SAN from multiple servers, journaling for fast recovery, and advanced storage management features including Quality of Service management, reporting of I/O and transaction performance, and distributed snapshots. The current version supports Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2. It can be used with any block storage hardware. Windows technologies such as Active Directory, ACL security, caching, DFS, Network Load Balancing, Failover Clustering, and MPIO are transparently supported by Melio within a shared storage environment. Melio uses a 64 bit file system architecture and is designed for very large file system sizes.

LaScala Volume Manager Software

LaScala is a clustered volume manager which simplifies management and improves flexibility and reliability of shared storage environments. Unlike native disk managers, it is designed to provide all servers accessing SAN storage the capability to see the entire disk structure and any changes made to it. It enables aggregation of storage across heterogeneous storage arrays into a single pool of data, and supports centralized and remote configuration and assignment of access to logical disks, as well as dynamic online volume creation and growth. Server access to a given volume is assigned using Windows ACLs. It is fully compatible with native OS file systems as well as Sanbolic’s Melio file system. The current version supports Windows 2003 and 2008 (including Server Core), and can be used with any block storage hardware. Windows technologies such as Active Directory, ACL security, DFS, Failover Clustering, Network Load Balancing, and MPIO are transparently supported by LaScala within a shared storage environment.
The Enterprise version of LaScala Volume Manager includes a feature called Disto that enables customers to remotely manage the volume structure for their entire SAN.

Centralized Resource Management and Availability Software

Sanbolic has introduced several software products that leverage the capability of the clustered file system and volume manager and facilitates centralized provisioning and protection of storage resources, as well as scale out and high availability for applications utilizing the shared storage.

This product family includes:

AppCluster: a solution for managing active-active clusters of SQL Servers, virtual machines and other resources in conjunction with Sanbolic’s clustered file system, Melio FS. This new product provides ease of management, high availability, very fast failover, and load balancing of multiple physical or virtual SQL servers accessing a single SAN LUN containing multiple data stores, while removing the complexity and the need for expensive unutilized hardware associated with traditional cluster models.

FilerScaler:  a management solution for scale-out Windows file serving shared-data clusters. The new management tool automates much of the configuration of clusters of multiple Windows file servers presenting a single file system to the network, in conjunction with Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager. The product can also be used for a management platform to provision and configure multiple Windows servers used for network shares using NTFS.

LaScala Disto:  is remote management  platform which allows administrators to  log into any domain or workgroup on the network, and manage volume structure, dynamically scale volumes and nodes accessing the volumes, configuration of RAID states and server access profiles to the storage utilizing native Windows security for all servers connected to the SAN. LaScala Disto is a component of LaScala Enterprise.
 
SILM: Simple Information Lifecycle manager allows files or volumes to be migrated or copied from one volume to any other volume the server has access to. It can also be used to invoke an industry standard VSS provider to create a snapshot of the data and then copy the data from the snapshot. SILM's policy management features allow administrators to easily manage data based on customer-definable security and access policies