Data management firm Sanbolic just introduced a new module for its Melio storage platform. Latency Targeted Allocator, or LTA for short, is essentially an optimization method for environments that include both spinning disks and faster, more expensive flash storage.

The company touts ‘real operational value’, saying that the new module can increase performance up to 10 times, and reduce the overhead associated with administrating these types of hybrid deployments.

LTA works in heterogeneous environments spread across multiple geographic locations, and does a few other things as well. It provides active-active access to frequently accessed data, centralized management and also makes it possible to dynamically allocate storage and enforce policies.

“With the launch of LTA, Sanbolic Melio can now effectively be leveraged as the ‘secret sauce’ for highly available, scalable and distributed flash deployments,” said Eric Slack, Senior Analyst, Storage Switzerland.  “By aggregating distributed server-side flash storage resources into a centrally managed ‘softSAN’ Melio extends the manageability and capabilities of these distributed deployments thereby enabling the adoption of server-side storage for cost effective high availability and scale-out environments.”

The new Melio version that ships with LTA is available for $9,600.

Flash offers better performance than disk, but due to economic barriers it’s only practical for storing the hot data sitting at the top of the priority list. As a result, vendors have already started adapting their technologies to accommodate this new way of managing mission-critical data.

Tokutek recently announced the latest version of its commercial MySQL solution. One of the major improvements is a tweak to the data structure that TokuDB 5.6 is built it on: data is now indexed in larger blocks of memory, making it easier for the underlying SSDs to process it and as a result extending the hardware’s lifespan.