Sanbolic Brings Snapshots to Melio FS

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 in Microsoft, Storage by slowe | 9 comments

Sanbolic is continuing to differentiate its clustered file system, Melio FS, in advance of the rudimentary clustered file system Microsoft plans on introducing in Windows Server 2008 R2. In an announcement last week, Sanbolic announced support for fully journaled snapshots. This functionality allows any server accessing the clustered file system to invoke a snapshot. The new snapshot functionality provides support for VSS and “full industry standard APIs,” although I’m not really sure what those “full industry standard APIs” are exactly.

You can download the full press release describing the new functionality here.

Separately, Sanbolic also announced that Melio FS fully supports Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008; more information on that is also available.

Now, if only Sanbolic would port Melio FS to VMware ESX/ESXi, then we could have some really interesting discussions. Snapshot functionality built into the shared file system, anyone?

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  1. Paul Monaghan’s avatar

    Paul Monaghan on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 10:32 pm

    Snapshot functionality built into the shared file system on ESX/ESXi? Netapp NFS. ;)

    Sorry, couldn’t resist.

  2. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    I was wondering who would be the first person to mention that. My bet was on a NetApp employee–guess I was wrong! :-)

  3. Slav Pidgorny’s avatar

    Slav Pidgorny on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 3:44 am

    Okay what about Microsoft NFS then?

  4. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 10:57 am

    Has Microsoft added snapshots to NTFS? Just because we’re using NFS doesn’t mean file system snapshots are available. NetApp bakes snapshots into WAFL, so Microsoft would need to do the same thing to make Microsoft NFS comparable.

  5. Paul Monaghan’s avatar

    Paul Monaghan on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 5:08 pm

    Hitz hasn’t offered me a job yet, but I haven’t asked either so I can’t blame him. ;)

    Us Netapp customers are sometimes a little quicker to push Netapp than Netapp themselves.

  6. Slav Pidgorny’s avatar

    Slav Pidgorny on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 7:12 pm

    Microsoft has snapshot functionality in NTFS for a long while now – it’s called Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Apparently it’s one of the most overlooked features of the platform.

  7. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 1:48 am

    Slav, you are right. I had overlooked VSS functionality. Thanks for correcting me!

  8. TimC’s avatar

    TimC on Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 8:59 pm

    I believe you misunderstood him anyways Scott. I think Slav was referring to MS supporting running VM’s off an NFS mount. At which point the snapshot would take place on the NFS server.

  9. jknick’s avatar

    jknick on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    Any recent ZFS based system would provide filesystem snapshots as well. Nexstor is a company that uses ZFS at the core of their product. The ZFS filesystem can share out as NFS but still manage as ZFS.