Sanbolic, a veteran data management specialist, launched the fifth release of its Melio storage framework this week. Melio5 delivers data center services through a distributed, high-availability abstraction layer that automates the management of commodity hardware.

The platform takes care of the plumbing in heterogeneous environments that include both SSD and disk-based components. The system eliminates the need for redundant flash caching in front of legacy storage by directly incorporating flash into hybrid volumes, and distributes data based on access frequency profiles to make things even more efficient. Melio5 provides RAID, remote replication, quality of Service, snapshots and other capabilities on top of this core storage virtualization functionality.

“Sanbolic’s Melio5 software enables corporate users to take advantage of flash and SSD in conjunction with commodity hardware to create an intelligent, cost effective, and high performance storage architecture like the huge public cloud companies run, while still ensuring enterprise workload scalability and high availability,” said Terri McClure, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Sanbolic’s software-led approach gives customers the choice of abandoning their proprietary arrays in favor of powerfully-managed commodity infrastructure that performs better, and cheaper, than vendor-packaged solutions. Companies such as Google and Facebook have been using the latter architecture for years in order to drive down costs and increase productivity: more automation means fewer admins manning the data center, and a smaller margin for human error.

According to Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante, “for years, storage vendors have profited from huge markups to spinning disk and proprietary controllers; but the value for enterprise storage has largely been in the software.” Vellante believes that while there is still a place for custom hardware designs, in general the market is rapidly moving toward rich storage and data management services as software, running on top of scale out commodity hardware. The analyst contends that CIOs must begin to organize their IT operations to take advantage of this trend or they’ll be at a cost and flexibility disadvantage.

The launch of Melio5 comes just a few months after the debut of the Latency Targeted Allocator, an add-on for the platform that optimizes the performance in hybrid environments. Sanbolic developed LTA for organizations that are using flash in their legacy environment, but lack the tools and know-how to effectively handle the added complexity on their own.