SANmelody can be integrated with Microsoft's Storage Management console.

SANmelody has been around longer than Open-E's iSCSI and certainly is the more sophisticated iSCSI solution. However, it requires a fully functional host system, which includes a system hard drive and an operating system license. In addition, SANmelody's price starts at around $1,178 and thus doubles the costs for the Open-E iSCSI Enterprise edition. Yet you can spend another $864 on an upgrade option that will provide the snapshot feature and auto provisioning, which takes care of allocating the available capacity dynamically rather than assigning fixed segments per iSCSI target. This, we have to say, is indeed pretty nice. However, multi teraByte and multi processor support again has to be purchased separately.

With the exception of the entry-level version, SANmelody supports Fibre Channel and offers some features that Open-E still cannot compete with: You may define auto failovers and go for asynchronous IP replication (this you will need for replicating data over the Internet), which allows for the creation of high-availability storage solutions based on mirrored systems. This, obviously, caters to the area of mission critical applications. See this page for all available versions. Should SANmelody not be capable of answering to your requirements, SANsymphony likely can, because it's the company's offering for 'large scale storage consolidation and automation.'

One downside is the more complex interface: While we believe that even a beginner can set up Open-E iSCSI, you should have a certain degree of experience before playing around with SANmelody.

DataCore is both very scalable and costly.

SANmelody Storage Servers will appear as devices within the storage management section of Microsoft's Management Console.

It will display all available volumes.