Sanbolic announces unified software-defined storage solution

Momchil Michailov, CEO and co-founder of Sanbolic, reached out to me to introduce the capabilities of his company's newest generation of storage virtualization/software-defined storage (SDN) technology. What's great about a conversation with the good Mr. Michailov, is that the focus is always on providing solutions to customers' problems rather than just offering hyperbole.

Bridging islands of storage

Sanbolic has always focused on helping companies deal with the islands of storage that get created in many IT environments. The company's goal is to offer a unified view of all of this storage that makes it possible for customers to enhance their investment in storage technology, i.e., separate features such as autotiering, compression, and deduplication and the creation of a single view of storage resources from the storage hardware underneath.

Storage should be available to all

Sanbolic believes that regardless of whether workloads are supported by Windows, Linux, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V, or VMware environments, the storage environment should simply work without administrators having to go to extreme lengths.

Scale up, scale out or hybrid environments

The company has supported customers' requirements to scale up, scale out or create a hybrid storage infrastructure configuration. Sanbolic believes that the customers' business and technical requirements — rather than limitations in teh storage software environment — should direct the selection of the proper storage elements. That means that configurations based upon some combination of DRAM, Flash, and many types of rotating media can easily be brought together to address customers' requirements and be made to appear as a single software-defined storage infrastructure.

Snapshot analysis

What's always impressed me about Sanbolic is that they deliver next-generation capabilities rather than just cite the most recent buzzwords or catchphrases. The company has been delivering high performance, virtualized storage since the early 2000s. Its customers have always commented that the technology is easier to deploy than they thought, supports just about any workload they throw at it, and delivers the promised savings on both administration and storage devices.