Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is used to extend the software-defined storage stack in your Windows Server, enabling you to build highly-available storage systems with local storage.
S2D is seen as an alternative to a traditional SAN/NAS product, providing a more cost effective and scalable solution by creating a pool of resilient storage tiers across Windows Server 2016 nodes. You can run your VM workload on the Storage Servers simultaneously, making the solution extremely cost effective.
With Storage Spaces Direct the storage provisioning and management becomes part of the Windows Server 2016 operating system rather than being a separate entity, removing the need for separate administration and expertise.
There’s no SAN Vendor lock-in, easy maintenance and simple expansion capabilities by either adding additional disks or addition nodes. Using the right hardware, you can also lower CPU requirements with NVMe and RDMA networking.
The Bunker has a wealth of experience with Windows 2016 Server technologies, including Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), and is perfectly placed to build secure storage platforms for use as either hyper-converged or as a storage server.
With our Storage Quality of Service (QOS) utilised within S2D, it is possible to tenant a platform, preventing any noisy neighbour scenarios and guaranteeing specific input/output operations per second (IOP) loads per tenant. All this whilst also ensuring data resilience and efficiency, as well as staying up to date with security patches and maintaining up time.
With The Bunker managing your S2D, your data is kept safe and secure, with easily expandable storage and flexibility options. We can provide both a managed or unmanaged solution in our ultra-secure data centres with UK sovereignty, so you know who is managing your servers and where your data is held.
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) takes internal storage across a cluster and pools it for fault tolerant and/or performance capability. The storage can consist of SAS or SATA HDD’s, SAS or SATA SSDs or NVMe.
S2D features built-in server-side caching to maximize storage performance by automatic configuration of SSD or NVMe drives. At its heart, Storage Spaces is about providing fault tolerance, often called 'resiliency', for your data. Its implementation is similar to RAID, except distributed across servers and implemented in software.
S2D supports various Storage efficiencies, 2 or 3 way mirroring and Accelerator Erasure Coding with Microsoft Local Reconstruction code, which is also used in Microsoft Azure (up to 80% efficiency).
As with RAID, there are various options when configuring Storage Spaces. These options allow you to customise to optimise factors such as faut tolerance, storage efficiency, and compute complexity. These broadly fall into two categories: 'mirroring' and 'parity'.
Resilience can be configured in various ways:
• As a two-way mirror with fault tolerance of 1 drive or server and 50% storage efficiency
• As a three-way mirror fault tolerance is 2 drives and storage efficiency of 33.3%
• As a dual parity with fault tolerance of 2 and storage efficiency of 50-80 %
• As a mixed mode with fault tolerance of 2 and storage efficiency of 33.3-80%
