Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

This post is about Microsoft Storage Replica – a disaster recovery tool, introduced by Microsoft in Windows Server 2016. It is a part of series about this technology, which is all featured on this blog. Basically, the post is a practical guide for building a “Shared Nothing” Scale-Out File Server, prepared by StarWind engineers after they did it themselves. The “Shared Nothing” is an architecture, which implies that each node is self-sufficient and completely independent, which makes the system more reliable. It got its name because the nodes don’t have a shared storage at all, moving closer to eliminating the single point of failure. The architecture is almost infinitely scalable, becoming popular with use cases where unpredictable and explosive growth is typical.

This is the first test in the series, dedicated to Microsoft Storage Replica – a new solution introduced in Windows Server 2016. It shows a step-by-step process of “Shared Nothing” Failover File Server building, based on the Server Message Block protocol (SMB3). Microsoft Storage Replica is a versatile data replication solution. It performs replication between servers, between volumes in a server, between clusters, etc. The typical use case for Microsoft Storage Replica is Disaster Recovery, which is basically replication to a remote site. It allows easy recovery of data in case the main site operation is disrupted by some sort of a force majeure, like natural disasters. The test is performed by StarWind engineers with a full report on the results.