Sanbolic Improves Clustered NAS

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- Sanbolic, Inc., a leading developer of software to simplify and share SAN storage, today announced a new component of Melio cluster file system which greatly improves the efficiency of network operations, resulting in much faster performance in clustered NAS systems for write intensive applications using network file serving installations.

Using Melio FS, multiple Windows Storage Server file serving appliances can be clustered into a common file system on external SAN storage. All Storage Servers have concurrent read and write access to the shared storage using Sanbolics clustered file system, so a file call can be processed by any of the Storage Servers.

Melio FS now fully implements the network redirector oplock protocol which defines the interaction between the file system and the network sharing service. This enables the clients to cache via their network redirector in clustered file serving installations and greatly improves performance in network operations such as file open, file attributes updates, and file data write. This architecture yields enormous increase in performance as network communication is no longer required for each operation. For example, an application writing 200 bytes blocks would not wait for a network round-trip time for each write, but the data would be grouped and sent asynchronously to the Storage Server running Melio FS, without blocking the application.

“Sanbolic has worked with Microsoft to integrate new network oplock technology into clustered file serving systems utilizing the Microsoft Windows Storage Server platform and Melio cluster file system,” said Bala Kasiviswanathan, director of storage solutions marketing at Microsoft. “This enhancement provides greater scalability of the performance of Windows Storage Server based file serving solutions for demanding write-intensive applications.”

Sanbolic Inc.