Storage Spaces Overview

Storage Spaces delivers storage virtualization capabilities within Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The storage stack has been fundamentally enhanced to incorporate two new abstractions:

• Storage pools are a collection of physical disks. Pools permit storage aggregation, flexible capacity expansion, and delegated administration.
  
  
• Storage spaces are virtual disks with associated attributes such as a desired level of resiliency, thin or fixed provisioning, automatic or controlled allocation on heterogeneous storage media, and precise administrative control.
  
  

Storage Spaces are manageable through the Windows Storage Management API in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Windows PowerShell, and through the File and Storage Services role in Server Manager. Storage Spaces is completely integrated with failover clustering for high availability, and it is integrated with CSV for scale-out deployments.

Storage Spaces includes the following features:

• Storage pools. Storage pools are the fundamental building blocks for Storage Spaces. Administrators are already familiar with this concept, so they will not have to learn a new model. They can flexibly create storage pools based on the needs of the deployment. For example, given a set of physical disks, an administrator can create one pool (by using all the available physical disks) or multiple pools (by dividing the physical disks as required). Furthermore, to maximize the value from storage hardware, the administrator can map a storage pool to combinations of hard disks as well as solid-state drives (SSDs). Pools can be expanded dynamically by simply adding additional drives, thereby seamlessly scaling to cope with unceasing data growth.
  
  
• Multitenancy. Administration of storage pools can be controlled through access control lists (ACLs) and delegated on a per-pool basis, thereby supporting hosting scenarios that require tenant isolation. Storage Spaces follows the familiar Windows security model; therefore, it can be fully integrated with Active Directory Domain Services.
  
  
• Resilient storage. Storage Spaces support two optional resiliency modes: mirroring and parity. Per-pool support for disks that are reserved for replacing failed disks (hot spares), background scrubbing, and intelligent error correction allow continuous service availability despite storage component failures. In the event of a power failure or cluster failover, the integrity of data is preserved so that recovery happens quickly and does not result in data loss.
  
  
• Continuous availability. Storage Spaces is fully integrated with failover clustering, which allows it to deliver continuously available service deployments. One or more pools can be clustered across multiple nodes within a single cluster. Storage spaces can then be instantiated on individual nodes, and the storage will seamlessly fail over to a different node when necessary (in response to failure conditions or due to load balancing). Integration with CSVs permits scale-out access to data.
  
  
• Optimal storage use. Server consolidation often results in multiple data sets sharing the same storage hardware. Storage Spaces supports thin provisioning to allow businesses to easily share storage capacity among multiple unrelated data sets and thereby maximize capacity use.
  
  Storage Spaces also supports trim, automatically running the Storage Optimizer to help reduce the physical footprint of data by consolidating data.
  
  
• Operational simplicity. Fully remoteable and scriptable management is permitted through the Windows Storage Management API, WMI, and Windows PowerShell. Storage Spaces can be easily managed through the File and Storage Services role in Server Manager. Storage Spaces also provides notifications when the amount of available capacity in a storage pool hits a configurable threshold.