Sanbolic, a Waltham, Mass.-based data storage software company, has released a new hardware-agnostic platform that enables businesses to unify the management of geo-distributed data.
The Sanbolic Platform, as the company calls it, runs on physical or virtual servers and consolidates heterogeneous legacy storage arrays into a pool of highly-available, cloud-ready storage, according to the company. The resulting storage abstraction layer provides centralized management over storage services, including snapshots, replication, data tiering, and quality of service, among others.
Organizations can leverage the Sanbolic platform to create "virtual active-active shared resources" made up of just a bunch of disks (JBOD) storage, flash arrays and server-side storage resources. Sanbolic supports Windows, Linux, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and integrates with OpenStack, the popular open source cloud computing software.
Moreover, the solution makes multiple storage management frameworks a thing of the past. In a blog post, Sanbolic executive chairman William Stevenson said his company's platform "can be managed from a single pane of glass, and dynamically assigned across up to 2048 servers."
Distributed environments pose no problem. Sambolic's n-node active-active approach "ensures performance scale-out and availability for both file and block storage—including active-active deployments spanning geo-distributed architectures."
Sanbolic also enables businesses to add performance-boosting flash capacity to their storage setups. "The Sanbolic platform allows SSD and flash storage to be woven into the storage pool as a persistent storage tier, and allows construction of hybrid HDD/SSD storage volumes with intelligent data placement and user defined ratio of each tier of storage," added Stevenson.
It's not the company's first brush with SSDs. Last year, Sanbolic released a flash-friendly version of its Melio storage platform.
The storage solution brings enterprises one step closer to exploiting the adaptive and elastic IT workload management capabilities of the so-called software-defined data center, according to Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Mark Peters. Asserting that the tech "already bridges the gaps between traditional enterprise hardware and the open platforms used in many hyper-scale data centers," he said in prepared remarks that Sambolic "gives enterprises a way to centralize and scale out hybrid storage resources for distributed environments – essentially making both data and workloads simultaneously highly available and yet elastic – in order to meet changing business demands."
Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic, argued in a statement that the industry is "in the midst of a major infrastructure market shift" that is leaving traditional storage management methodologies in the dust. "We're giving enterprises a simplified way to manage their entire data center operations in a centralized platform – regardless of how geographically distributed or siloed their current IT infrastructure may be," he added.