Microsoft Details Storage Spaces in Windows 8

To read this article from MSDN Blogs, click on:
Building Windows 8
An inside look from the Windows engineering team: Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency, by Steven Sinofsky

In this post, we are going to dive into a feature in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. Storage Spaces are going to dramatically improve how you manage large volumes of storage at home (and work). We’ve all tried the gamut of storage solutions-from JBOD arrays, to RAID boxes, or NAS boxes. Many of us have been using Windows Home Server Drive Extender and have been hoping for an approach architected more closely as part of NTFS and integrated with Windows more directly. In building the Windows 8 storage improvements, we set out to do just that and developed Storage Spaces. Of course, the existing solutions you already use will continue to work fine in Windows 8, but we think you will appreciate this new feature and the flexible architecture. As we talk all about consumer electronics next week, thinking about all the media we all have in photos (especially huge digital negatives) and videos, this feature is sure to come in handy. In this post, Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on our Storage and File System team, details this new feature.

Comments

We received this comment from Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta Systems:

"Windows 8 Storage Spaces does nothing to change the fundamental facts about Windows for storage. It just isn't enterprise class.

"Windows 8 Storage Spaces papers over some previous shortcomings, but does not solve a limit on the total TB that a file system can store, which is 16TB. It still lacks double or triple parity RAID, which means your data is at risk since the odds of two failures on a RAID group, and data loss, increases with large drives that take more time to rebuild. There is also no ability to snapshot and replicate your data. Finally, there is no end-to-end data integrity - there's nothing like the cryptographic-strength 256 bit checksums of ZFS-based solutions like NexentaStor.

"The foundations of Windows were written in the 1990s for desktops of that era. They were not built to address the requirements of managing large amounts of data. Windows remains an unsafe and unsuitable alternative for enterprises and organisations concerned about keeping their data safe."