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Storage Spaces Direct with different storage media

Colorful Mix

Article from ADMIN 43/2018

By Thomas Joos

In Windows Server 2016, software-defined storage lets you combine several volumes to create a central storage pool; then, you can use a combination of HDD, SSD, and NVMe SSD storage media to divide the pool into different volumes.

In Windows Server 2016, a Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) can comprise several hard disks, but also several servers, that can be connected to a cluster to increase data storage flexibility. S2D is certainly the most important innovation in the Windows Server 2016 storage universe. The system lets you combine locally allocated storage space from cluster nodes to create shared virtual storage in a cluster. The storage can then be used as a shared data carrier (e.g., for storing data from virtual servers).

The local volumes of the cluster nodes are used as data storage in a cluster with S2D. S2D requires a cluster with at least three hosts. With four hosts, the technology supports mirrored resiliency. If you want parity-based resiliency, at least four or more hosts are required. S2D is protected against host failure by default. The technology can even cope with the failure of an entire rack, including the servers it houses, depending on the configuration and the number of servers in the cluster.

Three Storage Technologies

In Windows Server 2016, three storage tiers can be used in the storage spaces: NVMe-based solid-state drives (SSDs) (NVM Express), SSDs, and hard disk drives (HDDs). Windows Server 2012 R2 supports only two storage tiers in storage pools and storage spaces. NVMe memory is used to cache data, and SSDs and HDDs are used for traditional data storage and archiving. You can also create different combinations of storage tiers with these three data carrier types.

S2D sees Microsoft competing with VMware's Virtual SAN, in which drives of several servers in a cluster are used as shared data storage. The focus is primarily on virtualization environments. For example, the storage locations of the virtual hard disks belonging to the virtual machines (VMs) in a Hyper-V cluster no longer represent a single point of failure if they are located on S2D, whose hard disks also replicate to

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