Hyper-V and Melio clustered file system enable real time infrastructure for the largest Multiple Listing Service in New England.
Sanbolic announced that MLS Property Information Network, Inc.(MLSPIN) has deployed Melio clustered file system in conjunction with Microsoft Hyper-V for their new data center. By allowing virtual servers running as file and web servers to concurrently access shared data on SAN storage, Melio FS enables the data center to dynamically respond to changes in web traffic.
MLSPIN is the largest MLS in New England and one of the top ten in the nation. It provides service to more than 30,000 real estate professionals throughout New England with a comprehensive database of more than 60,000 active listings. The new infrastructure uses Hyper-V to allow multiple virtual servers to run on each HP server, which utilize Quad-core AMD Opteron processors. The virtual machines are running Microsoft Windows 2008 file services and IIS services.
“Melio file system provides two key advantages for us,” said Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology, MLSPIN. “By providing a single storage LUN for Hyper-V virtual machine files, we greatly simplify the storage configuration required to enable Hyper-V quick migration. More importantly, Melio allows us to provide shared access to application data on a SAN from multiple virtual servers – this dramatically improves the manageability of production releases and allows us to quickly provision new virtual servers in response to traffic. This gives us the real-time infrastructure capabilities that we believe are the cornerstone of the next generation data center.”
Sanbolic’s Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager are designed to support Windows applications that benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool, which can be accessed simultaneously by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64-bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes. These products install easily on physical or virtual servers, and can leverage virtually any fibre channel or iSCSI storage infrastructure. Windows Active Directory and clustering features are fully supported. Reporting on storage I/O and transaction performance facilitates optimization of storage-intensive workloads. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined workloads in bandwidth-constrained environments.
When used with Hyper-V, Sanbolic’s Melio FS provides functionality similar to VMWare’s VMFS, allowing all virtual machines file to be stored on the same SAN storage volume while being simultaneously available to all hosts. This simplifies storage management and enables simplified migration of virtual machines across physical nodes. Unlike VMFS, Melio FS enables all virtual machines to have simultaneous access to application data on the SAN. Shared access enables virtual data centers to be much more flexible, improving application availability and scalability in response to higher demand.
