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Vitalii Feshchenko
  • Vitalii Feshchenko
  • October 24, 2017

How to configure a Multi-Resilient Volume on Windows Server 2016 using Storage Spaces

Plenty of articles have been released about Storage Spaces and everything around this topic. However, I would like to absorb all actual information and lead you through the journey of configuring Storage Spaces on a Standalone host. The main goal of the article is to show a Multi-Resilient Volume configuration process. In order to use Storage Spaces, we need to have faster (NVMe, SSD) and slower (HDD) devices. So, we have a set of NVMe devices along with SAS HDD or SATA HDD, and we should create performance and capacity tier respectively.
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Taras Shved
  • Taras Shved
  • February 10, 2017

Storage Spaces Direct: Enabling S2D work with unsupported device types (BusType = NVMe, RAID, Fibre Channel)

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is a new storage feature introduced in Windows Server 2016 Datacenter, which significantly extends the Software-Defined Storage stack in Windows Server product family and allows users building highly available storage systems using directly attached drives. Storage Spaces Direct, or S2D, simplifies the deployment and management of Software-Defined Storage systems and allows using more disk devices classes like SATA and NVMe drives. Previously, it was not possible to use these types of storage with clustered Storage Spaces with shared disks. Storage Spaces Direct can use drives that are locally attached to nodes in a cluster or disks that are attached to nodes using enclosure. It aggregates all the disks into a single Storage Pool and enables the creation of virtual disks on top.
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Vladislav Karaiev
  • Vladislav Karaiev
  • January 4, 2017

Storage HA on the Cheap: Fixing Synology DiskStation flaky Performance with StarWind Free. Part 1 (Architecture)

DiskStation DS916+ is a further improvement of DS415+ model. Storage capacity in DS916+ can be scaled using DX513 expansion units, making a total of nine 3.5 disk bays. Given the relatively small form factor and impressive capacity potential, such configuration may become a great solution for small businesses and enthusiasts.
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Askar Kopbayev
  • Askar Kopbayev
  • November 8, 2016

Back to basics – RAID types

If you ever worked in IT, you have heard the acronym RAID.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (some call it Inexpensive) Disks. So, it basically refers to a group of disk logically presented as one or more volumes to the external system – a server, for instance. The main two reasons to have RAID are Performance and Redundancy.  With RAID, you can minimize the access time and increase the throughput of data. RAID also allows one or more disks in the array to fail without losing any data.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • September 23, 2016

Manage VM placement in Hyper-V cluster with VMM

The placement of the virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster is an important step to ensure performance and high availability. To make a highly available application, usually, a cluster is deployed spread across two or more virtual machines. In case of a Hyper-V node is crashing, the application must keep working. But the VM placement concerns also its storage and its network. Let’s think about a storage solution where you have several LUNs (or Storage Spaces) according to a service level. Maybe you have an LUN with HDD in RAID 6 and another in RAID 1 with SSD. You don’t want that the VM which requires intensive IO was placed on HDD LUN.
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Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • October 2, 2015

RAID: Parity RAID vs SSD

The post describes the history of RAID 5 and how it became obsolete at some point in time, just because HDD capacity grew at an enormous rate. It happened due to the chance of failure that grew to literal imminence when spinning disks reached TB scale, because the reading speed still had the same physical limits. Basically, creating a RAID 5 even with 1 TB disks would mean certain failure of the whole array and quite soon. The array technology was “saved” by an unlikely ally – the SSD. Being faster than hard disk drives in everything, they almost nullify the chance of the abovementioned failures. The post is written for everyday reader, not just engineers, and is quite comprehensive even without special knowledge and skills.
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