DataCore Software has upgraded its SANmelody software to enable small and medium businesses to automate the processing of serving disk space to clients using iSCSI and storage area networks.

SANmelody 2.0 provides "virtual capacity," which DataCore describes as a way to connect multi-terabyte virtual disks to application servers. The vendor said that that the storage capacity that gets served up is hardware-independent, so users can tap Serial ATA, Fibre Channel or SCSI disks. Pricing for the virtual capacity option starts at around $900.

By moving beyond Fibre Channel, DataCore said it's making virtual storage easier to afford for smaller organizations, and using existing Ethernet, IP or SAN infrastructure to do it.

In addition, users can take SANmelody 2.0 and deploy flexible storage networks from which to serve Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware systems. "The combination makes sense, because users want a complete virtual infrastructure that optimizes their server and storage resources and adds flexibility to handle constant change requests," said George Teixeira, president of DataCore, in a statement.

DataCore also said SANmelody 2.0 now supports Windows Server 2003 storage functions like virtual disk services (VDS), volume shadow copy services (VSS) and multipath I/O (MPIO). That in turn enables administrators to use a standard methodology to invoke disk services, set up snapshots and support multi-path redundancy across a spectrum of workloads and storage devices, DataCore explained.

SANmelody 2.0 also provides a new Windows volume pass-through feature that migrates, imports and manages existing live data on Windows file system volumes. These volumes can n turn be served back to application servers, the vendor said. Existing volumes can continue to be used normally or the live data can be seamlessly migrated to other virtual volumes or onto newer disks managed by SANmelody.

Base pricing ranges from $1,178 to $7,857; options range in price from $864 to $3,928. The software is available now and can be downloaded for a free, 30-day trial.