Sanbolic smoke ball was no mere puff: Citrix preps new Melio release

Citrix says it's ready to let customers loose on its software-defined storage play.

Citrix's ambitions in the field emerged last January, when it slurped storage virtualiser Sanbolic. Since then the company's said precious little about Sanbolic, all the while looking a little shambolic as it endured missed quarters, management changes and apparently tried to sell itself to any bidder.

Now the company says it's created a new version of Sanbolic's flagship Melio product and is ready to inflict it on customers willing to give a release candidate a whirl.

Melio allows its users to identify diverse storage resources in their organisations and treat them as a single logical pool of storage.

Citrix's twist on the concept is to tweak Melio so it is optimised for its own workloads, specifically XenDesktop and XenApp. That ambition may not go down entirely well among Citrix's partners, plenty of whom make much of their ability to get virtual desktops humming along at impressive speed. Citrix can counter by saying that Melio will virtualise partners' arrays and then deepen the pool of storage that can be applied to its workloads by roping in other storage, which could be a win-win for all concerned.

Disaster recovery's another mooted application, as Melio lets users define multi-site storage rigs.

Any enhancements to Melio haven’t been discussed, but Citrix says this is a whole new version, 6.0 to be precise.

Citrix has already walked away from mainstream server virtualisation while continuing to offer the technology for its own workloads. Applying the same strategy to Melio is surely a sign that Citrix thinks it can do best with a stack of integrated products.

Going all-in with a struggling vendor is an interesting strategy, no matter if that vendor remains a US$3bn concern that won't evaporate in a hurry. Closing an ecosystem is also a bold move. Let's see how this works out for Citrix, shall we? ®