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Storage innovations in Windows Server 2016

Employee of the Month

Article from ADMIN 34/2016

By Jan Kappen

The upcoming release of Windows Server 2016 introduces major innovations in the field of storage. With built-in storage replication, Storage Spaces Direct, and traffic shaping for storage access via QoS, Windows Server looks like a good candidate for employee of the month.

Windows Server 2016 offers many advances in network storage. To understand what is happening in Microsoft storage now, it is best to start with a recap on some innovations that arrived in Windows Server 2012.

With the Windows Server 2012 release, Microsoft first unveiled an option for setting up a file server for application data using on-board tools. This feature assumes two to eight servers that run a file server in a failover cluster and thus offer high availability. The storage can either be SAS disks in enclosures or logical unit numbers (LUNs) attached via Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN)/Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI). This storage is then provided to the application servers, such as Hyper-V or SQL Server, over the network. SMB version 3 is used as the protocol.

In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft offered the ability to use SSDs and HDDs simultaneously in a storage pool for performance reasons. This technology, known as tiering, automatically moves frequently used data in 1MB chunks to fast disks (SSDs) during operation, while data that sees little or no use is stored on HDDs. This technique gives admins the ability to build high-performance, highly available, and economically attractive storage solutions.

If you are using SSDs, 1GB of the available space is used as a write-back cache by default. This reduces the latency for write operations and the negative performance impact on other file operations. Other new features in Windows 2012 R2 were the support for parity disks in the failover cluster, the use of dual parity (similar to a RAID 6), and the ability to automatically repair or recreate Storage Spaces given sufficient free space in the pool. This repair feature removed the need for "hot spare" media. The free disk space on the functional disks is used to restore data integrity.