Citrix has announced Melio 6, the company's first new release of Melio since Citrix acquired Sanbolic back in January 2015.  It was the acquisition of Sanbolic that helped thrust Citrix into software-defined storage for the next generation datacenter.

Citrix Melio is an enterprise storage and data virtualization platform that is workload, hypervisor, and storage agnostic.  It can run on physical, virtual, cloud and geo-distributed datacenters.  Melio helps Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp customers simplify their data and storage management, achieve infrastructure and workload scale-out and high availability.

Melio extends the benefits of virtualization to the storage layer by decoupling data from the physical storage in much the same way that server virtualization decouples the operating system from physical servers.  Melio allows XenDesktop and XenApp administrators to have comprehensive host-based control and tier-one storage capabilities in their infrastructure.  

 

"With the launch of Melio 6, we are extending our position as industry leaders of business mobility and introducing business continuity at the data and storage layer," said Eva Helén, senior director of business development at Citrix.  "Melio 6 will let customers improve the economics and elasticity of their existing server and storage infrastructure, creating the perfect converged or hyper-converged IT environment."

According to Citrix, Melio 6 is considered a major upgrade and will include a brand new user interface with optimized performance and scalability for hyper-converged architectures.  The Enterprise edition will include a new patent-pending, storage protocol ISA (Citrix’s Independent Storage Architecture) which will identify storage resources on all Melio-powered servers on the network, aggregating them into a common storage pool which is then shared by all servers.  This will provide the high availability customers are expecting.  No more dependency on external storage or expensive and proprietary connectivity; and customers will get true storage economics, equivalent to the cost savings and ease of use provided by cloud vendors.

Melio 6 is being offered to Citrix desktop and app customers looking for reduced image management, high availability of PVS/MCS, databases and user profiles.  It will also be available to customers with more than one location for geo-distribution of data and those moving toward hyper-converged infrastructure.

"As our customers are adopting mobile workspaces, the demand for easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use infrastructure is on the rise," explained Helén.  "More data equals more data management headaches and legacy storage infrastructure is no longer cutting it.  System admins are worried about not being able to access data when they need it, at the speed they need it."

Melio 6 is sold as a standalone and is not included with any other Citrix products.  It is licensed per server (physical or virtual), accessing all or part of the shared storage pool.  And all existing Melio Enterprise customers with active support contracts will be eligible to upgrade to Melio 6 with ISA.

You can download the software at http://www.citrix.com/downloads/melio.html.