Sanbolic takes file serving to next level

WALTHAM, USA: Sanbolic, the market leader in distributed data management, today announced the general availability of ShareCenter, a new Melio Enterprise software file serving module that transforms siloed Windows Server environments into highly scalable network-attached storage (NAS) solutions, at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.

Designed for large enterprise virtual and cloud environments, ShareCenter enables customers to seamlessly consolidate file serving workloads onto commodity hardware, as well as centralize provisioning, management and quality of service (QoS) capabilities. By eliminating the need for expensive and problematic proprietary hardware and management interfaces, customers can enjoy dramatic capital and operational (CapEx and OpEx) savings.

The new and innovative Melio ShareCenter features and benefits include:

Hardware Agnostic – enables customers to save dramatically by investing in commodity hardware that costs less, scales more efficiently and is easier to manage than expensive proprietary technology.

Centralized Provisioning – provides centralized control and visibility at every level of the file serving environment; provisioning can become as fast and easy as a flip of a switch.

Granular Quality of Service (QoS) – provides a means by which to substantially improve the control of traffic and bandwidth – enables fast and efficient fine-tuning for more specific applications, environments and configurations; ensures consistent application performance and alignment with user-defined policies in physical and virtual environments.

Eliminates Single Points of Failure – further ensures high availability (HA) and protection of applications and information during day-to-day activity, as well as specific initiatives, such as software upgrades, during which systems can be up and running, with no interruption in service.

Dynamic Scale – provides ability to immediately and non-disruptively add and remove capacity as required.

“Over 60 percent of Windows Server shipments are installed in file serving environments – yet, Windows does not scale. Consequently, silos of Windows Servers have become commonplace in most enterprise IT environments, resulting in extremely inefficient management and resource utilization. This problem is compounded by the fact that current scale-out NAS solutions have proven to be expensive, overly complex, not to mention - ineffective,” said Deni Connor, founding analyst, Storage Strategies NOW. “A solution such as ShareCenter that is non-proprietary, highly affordable and offers the ability to successfully overcome these challenges in an uncomplicated manner will be met with tremendous customer approval.”

“High touch client relationships are the key for any successful real estate company. We offer our clients the most comprehensive real estate centric automated business management and accounting solutions, which allows them to dramatically reduce the time they dedicate to administrative activities,” said Paul Furtado, IT Director, Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies, the North American leader in real estate software, services and solutions. “In order to deliver the industry’s premier services with the undeniably highest ROI, we are leveraging Sanbolic’s Melio ShareCenter to ensure 24/7/365 data access, availability, data security and protection.”

"Sanbolic's Melio allows us to create a highly available file serving environment for our investment management application. The addition of Melio ShareCenter to our VMware virtualized Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Equallogic storage infrastructure is a key scale-out file serving component,” said Mike Bordignon, Infrastructure manager, Gareth Morgan Investments. “Melio ShareCenter gives us application agility and availability on industry standard x86 hardware - providing enterprise capability at a fraction of the cost of traditional NAS solutions and significantly reduced management cost."

“File serving has become the virtual backbone of modern business. Consequently, as today’s most prevalent workload, it has become IT’s biggest priority and unfortunately - biggest headache,” said Momchil Michailov, co-founder and CEO, Sanbolic. “With very few alternatives, even the most sophisticated IT organizations have had little choice other than to invest in proprietary NAS solutions, that present clear disadvantages in terms of cost, security and scalability, as well as vendor lock-in and compatibility issues. We now bring Melio ShareCenter to these customers, offering an easy to acquire, deploy and manage file serving solution that allows customers to scale their infrastructure, without having to scale their costs, while ensuring the highest availability, data protection and performance.”

Industry experts state that customers invest many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) in proprietary hardware and management interfaces for file serving environments, on top of the numerous and highly valuable IT management man-hours dedicated to managing that environment – hours that could be rededicated to activities more directly tied to the company’s bottom-line. Consequently, ShareCenter’s return on investment (ROI) is substantial and virtually immediate. ShareCenter is included with each Melio software purchase. Melio’s pricing starts at $999.