Storage pools and storage spaces in Windows

The Deep End

Windows Server 2012 R2

From Windows Server 2012 onward, you can use storage spaces in conjunction with the Microsoft Failover Cluster feature. SAS disks from disk units connected directly to cluster nodes are published using the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) feature to house, for example, virtual machines with Hyper-V. The use of two-way mirroring and parity resiliency types in Windows Server 2012 R2 also enables high availability of hard drive storage.

Microsoft has enhanced the storage space feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 to include auto-tiering. This allows you to move heavily used storage blocks to fast memory, such as SSDs, and less heavily used storage blocks to SAS storage. According to various studies, storage spaces associated with CSV in Windows Failover clusters provide a comparable performance to 10GBps iSCSI SAN or 8GBps Fibre Channel at a much cheaper price [5].

Conclusions

Storage spaces and storage pools in Windows 8.1 provide a simple, reliable, and high-performance technology for combining a variety of storage technologies in a single logical unit, thus ensuring high availability of storage space using different resiliency methods. Storage capacities can be provided easily and efficiently by combining cheap and various mass memory storage technologies; this also allows storage space to be enhanced easily, with the help of thin provisioning.

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