Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

(1/7) > >>

40hz:
Every so often, one of the big players does something right.

In this case, the player is none other than Microsoft who has finally let us in on what their plans are for replacing the  Drive-Extender technology formerly found in Windows Home Server. From a recent article over at ArsTechnica, the answer is something called "Windows 8 Storage Spaces." A bit of technology that goes one better than what it is replacing. (full article here)

When Microsoft killed Windows Home Server's "Drive Extender" technology, we mourned its loss but held up hope that the company would persevere with the concept. The company has done just that with a new Windows 8 feature called Storage Spaces, described in a lengthy post to its Building Windows 8 blog.

With Storage Spaces, physical disks are grouped together into pools, and pools are then carved up into spaces, which are formatted with a regular filesystem and are used day-to-day just like regular disks.

Unlike RAID systems of old, but in common with other modern storage technologies such as Solaris' ZFS and Linux's btrfs, pools can use disks of different interface technologies—USB, SATA, Serial Attached SCSI—and different, mismatched sizes. New disks can be added to a pool at any time. Pools can also include one or more hot spares: drives allocated to a pool but kept in standby until another disk in the pool fails, at which point they spring into life.

Storage in a pool is then distributed among one or more spaces. Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space's data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.

Spaces can be thinly provisioned, allowing the creation of spaces that are larger than the underlying pool. This allows potentially simpler management—a large "media" space for TV shows and movies could be created with some large size, say 50 TB, with only 2 TB of physical capacity in the pool. As more shows are recorded or downloaded, and space becomes tighter, additional drives can be added to the pool; the space will then use this extra capacity with no further configuration required.
--- End quote ---

The only drawback noted was the current planned implementation does not allow booting from a Storage Space disk group.

Perhaps the only fly in the ointment for most home users is that in Windows 8, Storage Spaces will not be bootable. The company says that guidance will be offered on how to partition disks so that a partitioned boot disk can be added to a pool, but that straightforward booting unfortunately won't be possible. On some levels, this is unsurprising: many advanced filesystem and storage systems are not bootable in their initial version, and Storage Spaces certainly won't be the first. On the other, it would certainly be a desirable addition, as it would ensure that even if a boot disk failed, your PC would remain operational.
--- End quote ---

Probably not that big a concern for most desktops. Especially since there is an announced partitioning workaround that will allow you to reserve a portion of a drive used in a Storage Space as a regular boot device. But I'm sure that little bump will be smoothed over eventually.

On the enterprise side, it's much bigger news - because yes!!! - Storage Spaces is also being targeted at enterprise servers. If this comes to pass, it will be a big day for Microsoft sysadmins everywhere. Because Storage Spaces has the potential to become that long wished for thing that will finally liberate server admins from that migraine headache called: RAID. It's a big enough deal that it would be worth considering a server upgrade for that alone IMO.

If Storage Spaces does make it to 'gold master', things are definitely looking up for 2012 AFAIC. :Thmbsup: ;D

JavaJones:
Wooo! Can't wait to put Win8 on my HTPC. Not only will Metro actually make sense there, but Storage Spaces will rock for big (HD) movie storage!

- Oshyan

db90h:
It has never went away, and exists in Windows 7 and Windows 2008/R2/Home Server 2011. They just removed the easy interface for it. Simply set up a 'spanned' volume and you can dynamically add disks as you want - including external disks. The intrinsic support for this never really went anywhere.

40hz:
It has never went away, and exists in Windows 7 and Windows 2008/R2/Home Server 2011. They just removed the easy interface for it. Simply set up a 'spanned' volume and you can dynamically add disks as you want - including external disks. The intrinsic support for this never really went anywhere.
-db90h (January 08, 2012, 02:30 PM)
--- End quote ---

Interesting...does it also include the data protection features mentioned earlier? Disk pooling and spanning itself is no big deal. Safe data redundant spanning is a very different story. And redundancy/parity safeguards were what got left out when they dropped the old Drive Extender.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understood - this is the part that's very new to Storage Spaces:

Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance offered: 2-way mirroring, 3-way mirroring, and RAID 5-like parity. With the mirrored options, a space's data is stored either twice or three times within a pool. With the parity option, the system will compute additional information and store this within the pool. If any disk in the pool fails, the data can be reconstructed using this additional information.
--- End quote ---

You can do some of that with software RAID in Windows. But that's for a declared drive array rather than a flexible pool.


 :)

Stoic Joker:
You can do some of that with software RAID in Windows. But that's for a declared drive array rather than a flexible pool.-40hz (January 08, 2012, 02:47 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yeah, the basic spanning, striping, & soft RAID stuff came out with the original Dynamic Disk on Win2k. The extended redundancy stuff only showed up on and currently exists for WHS. Sure partitioning is more On-the-Fly flexible on 7/08 but redundancy? Not so much.

Oh and about the RAID 5-like parity quote ... You're just twisting the knife on me aren't you.  :D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page