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

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40hz:
Oh and about the RAID 5-like parity quote ... You're just twisting the knife on me aren't you.  :D
-Stoic Joker (January 08, 2012, 03:20 PM)
--- End quote ---

Actually... no.  ;D

Like you. I work with RAID-5. A lot. (Used to almost automatically spec it for server clients too.) So if you're anything like me, you get enough pain from occasional RAID issues that nobody needs to inflict any additional agony on you when it comes to that.

 :Thmbsup: ;)

MrCrispy:
I believe this is very different from the spanning/dynamic volume support already present in Windows.

- data is written in 256MB slabs, which also include metadata. Thus the physical disks are readable in any other Win 8 pc, as long as you have enough to form a 'quorum'
- support for parity, mirroring and resiliency
- probably built on top of a new filesystem layer called ReFS, details on which are scarce

This is the work the WHS team was doing for DE v2 when they decided to scrap DE completely from WHS 2011. I hope its will include features such as Single Instance Storage and automatic error correction and detection (the 2 missing biggies) soon.

40hz:
I believe this is very different from the spanning/dynamic volume support already present in Windows.-MrCrispy (January 10, 2012, 09:03 PM)
--- End quote ---

It is.  :)

I hope its will include features such as Single Instance Storage and automatic error correction and detection (the 2 missing biggies) soon.

--- End quote ---

The data relocation and recovery via parity and mirroring will be fully automated. Is that what you meant by automatic error correction?

Regarding single instances, I don't think that's in the cards. But it doesn't surprise me since that's more (in my experience) a feature of a data store (i.e. like Exchange's PST/OST + underlying database) rather than file store. AFAIK "single instance" presupposes the existence of a full database of some sort. It's a higher level of abstraction than a general purpose file management system.

IIRC Microsoft dropped across the board SIS in Exchange 2007. E2k7 only applies SIS to message attachments. And starting with Exchange 2010, it's gone completely since it negatively impacts I/O performance and interferes with the deployment of other planned features. Supposedly, SIS provided storage space savings of less than 20% of what it would be without SIS. So with the advent of inexpensive and huge hard drives, Microsoft has concluded that real world disk space savings no longer justify the performance hit and complexity costs of continuing to have SIS in Exchange.

But now I'm curious. Is there a general purpose file system/manager that enforces single instance data storage? I'm not aware of any. But that's not to say there isn't. (And I'm always interested in learning something new.  :))




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XKCD's Randall Munroe Rules!!!!  ;D :Thmbsup:

MrCrispy:
Windows server products such as Storage Server have SIS on all data. WHS also has it for backups.

Stoic Joker:
The WHS backups did use deduplication to prevent multiple copies of (for example) the OS files from taking up excessive space. But I don't think that's quite what they're referring to. I haven't had a chance to play with WSS so I'm not sure what it does.

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