Windows Server 2016 Storage Enhancements

Wes Miller analyzes and writes about Microsoft’s security, identity management, and systems management technologies. Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Wes... more

Two Windows Server 2016 storage features, Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica, will help organizations and hardware manufacturers build software-defined storage solutions on Windows. The features could improve the disaster recovery capabilities of the OS and extend the deployment of Windows software-defined storage to a broader market. These enhancements should require no changes to existing applications, but they may require new hardware, and they will require Datacenter edition.

Storage Spaces Direct

Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition includes Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), a technology for building large, highly available shared storage volumes using internal commodity drives, which builds on the Storage Spaces feature.

Storage Spaces Background

Storage Spaces, introduced in Windows Server 2012, enabled the creation of storage pools, which are groups of commodity drives grouped together and presented as a single volume to Windows and applications. The technology can reduce cost by grouping low-cost commodity drives to create a large volume, as compared to purchasing expensive storage solutions. Originally, Storage Spaces could be created across two or more Windows Server systems, but doing so required using a shared “just a bunch of drives” (JBOD) chassis with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)-based drives. SAS was required because it includes multi-initiator functionality that allows more than one controller to communicate with a drive at the same time, which Serial ATA (SATA) drives do not support. Windows Server 2016 retains the original Storage Spaces functionality (now referred to as “Storage Spaces with Shared JBOD”) and adds S2D. S2D allows servers to share their own directly attached drives as a part of a Storage Space with four to 12 servers. For example, with S2D, applications could see what appears to be a single file server, but it would actually consist of four or more servers with up to 240 disks in total. S2D requires the use of ReFS, the new file system introduced in Windows Server 2012.

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