Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012

Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 enables cost-effective, optimally used, highly available, scalable, and flexible storage solutions for business-critical (virtual or physical) deployments. 

Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 deliver sophisticated storage virtualization capabilities, which empower customers to use industry-standard storage for single computer and scalable multinode deployments. It is appropriate for a wide range of customers, from consumers using Windows 8 for personal storage, to enterprise and cloud hosting companies using Windows Server 2012 for highly available storage that can cost-effectively grow with demand.

FEATURES: 

Storage Spaces includes the following features:

• Storage pools. Storage pools are the fundamental building blocks for Storage Spaces. Administrators are already familiar with this concept, so they will not have to learn a new model. They can flexibly create storage pools based on the needs of the deployment. For example, given a set of physical disks, an administrator can create one pool (by using all the available physical disks) or multiple pools (by dividing the physical disks as required). Furthermore, to maximize the value from storage hardware, the administrator can map a storage pool to combinations of hard disks as well as solid-state drives (SSDs). Pools can be expanded dynamically by simply adding additional drives, thereby seamlessly scaling to cope with unceasing data growth.

• Multitenancy. Administration of storage pools can be controlled through access control lists (ACLs) and delegated on a per-pool basis, thereby supporting hosting scenarios that require tenant isolation. Storage Spaces follows the familiar Windows security model; therefore, it can be fully integrated with Active Directory Domain Services.

• Resilient storage. Storage Spaces support two optional resiliency modes: mirroring and parity. Per-pool support for disks that are reserved for replacing failed disks (hot spares), background scrubbing, and intelligent error correction allow continuous service availability despite storage component failures. In the event of a power failure or cluster failover, the integrity of data is preserved so that recovery happens quickly and does not result in data loss.

• Continuous availability. Storage Spaces is fully integrated with failover clustering, which allows it to deliver continuously available service deployments. One or more pools can be clustered across multiple nodes within a single cluster. Storage spaces can then be instantiated on individual nodes, and the storage will seamlessly fail over to a different node when necessary (in response to failure conditions or due to load balancing). Integration with CSVs permits scale-out access to data.

• Optimal storage use. Server consolidation often results in multiple data sets sharing the same storage hardware. Storage Spaces supports thin provisioning to allow businesses to easily share storage capacity among multiple unrelated data sets and thereby maximize capacity use. 

Storage Spaces also supports trim, automatically running the Storage Optimizer to help reduce the physical footprint of data by consolidating data.

• Operational simplicity. Fully remoteable and scriptable management is permitted through the Windows Storage Management API, WMI, and Windows PowerShell. Storage Spaces can be easily managed through the File and Storage Services role in Server Manager. Storage Spaces also provides notifications when the amount of available capacity in a storage pool hits a configurable threshold.