Increasingly I find myself on the lookout for enterprise-strength products than can be applied to the needs of small and midsize businesses.  Often I find half-solutions and partial answers.  Sometimes I find some gems. In the previous newsletter, we looked at FalconStor's iSCSI Storage Server.  Today, let's give equal time to SANmelody, the recently announced offering from DataCore.
 
SANmelody is "disk server" software that brings much of the functionality of the company's enterprise level SANsymphony into the SMB marketplace.  Users who download SANmelody from DataCore's Web site will find an easily managed storage platform where multiple application servers can access pooled storage.

But it's not just efficiency in terms of drive utilization that DataCore is providing; what it really offers is an opportunity for smaller IT rooms to build a storage environment that is as well managed as the ones at their larger competitors.  That means a package that also provides disaster recovery, high-availability, auto provisioning and replication options.  One likely scenario might have the SANmelody software on an existing server, providing a local data pool accessible by any number of local application servers.  This data in turn is mirrored asynchronously over an IP data path to a remote disk server, which in turn is accessed by a "recovery server." 

Optional snapshot software provides suitable granularity to the replication process so that sites can choose how up-to-date the replicated copy of the data is.  If disaster strikes the primary site or if for some reason the servers are suddenly found to be accessing corrupted data (rumor has it that this really does happen), the data at the replication site - which may be on the other side of the building, or on the other side of the country - is ready to go. 

SANmelody does all this while taking advantage of the economies that iSCSI offers. For those of you who are of the Fibre Channel persuasion the software also supports a mix-and-match environment of Fibre Channel and Ethernet.  

DataCore has posted solid SPC-1 numbers for IOPS (I/Os per second), and price-performance numbers that are more than solid.  A free trial copy of the SANmelody software is easily downloaded from DataCore's Web site (http://www.datacore.com).

DataCore and FalconStor have come a long way since the days when they were the twin voices of storage virtualization crying out in the wilderness.  Both companies have had credible successes in the enterprise market space, and both have learned that IT these days is much more likely to buy solutions to business problems than they are to buy gee-whiz technology.  Now both firms are taking careful aim at the SMB space that represent a huge portion of the North American and European markets.  In each case, it looks like solidly performing enterprise-level storage software has been crafted into a package that is well suited to the mid-market. 

It will be interesting to watch as increasing numbers of enterprise vendors begin to understand the huge and under-served mid-market, and begin to roll out suitable product. Expect more on solutions for this segment in later columns.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.