News

Sanbolic Brings Clustered File System, Volume Management To Hyper-V

• By Barbara Darrow
• December 20, 2007

Sanbolic will soon announce support for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization product.

The Watertown, Mass., company offers volume management software and a clustered file system -- both of which complement Microsoft's Windows Server and upcoming virtualization stack, says Bill Stevenson, executive chairman of the company.

Sanbolic's special sauce is that its software lets servers see and access disks at the same time.

"Any type of application using Microsoft servers or workstations can benefit from that shared access to SAN data," Stevenson said.

"For many applications, like Web servers where you have active content from multiple sources and traffic variations, we can provide a single pool of active content. All content and Web servers can access the data concurrently so there's no need for replication across the various devices . You can add capacity immediately by adding Web servers," he noted.

The tandem of Sanbolic's LaScala volume management and Melio, the clustered file system, are usually both installed in cases where you're looking for shared file access, says Mark Crescenzi, CEO of Prismworks Technology, Inc., a Hummelstown, Penn.-based solution provider.

"Traditionally you have disks presented and even in a clustered environment usually one node accesses [the disks] at a time. Even in an active-active environment, one node is primary and fails over to a secondary. What Sanbolic does is allow multiple nodes to access files at the same time; it really puts the network in the storage area network."

Microsoft's Hyper-V will be available with several Windows Server 2008 SKUs and as a standalone server. Windows Server 2008 is due early next year and the finished version of Hyper-V within 180 days of that. A week ago, Microsoft launched the first public beta of Hyper-V.