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