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Tiering from Microsoft Storage Spaces to Object Storage
March 21, 2018

Tiering from Microsoft Storage Spaces to Object Storage

Tiering-Microsoft-StorageBack in 2012, Storage Spaces replaced Logical Disk Manager (technology licensed from Veritas) with a Microsoft implementation of virtual volume management into the core of the Windows ecosystem. This introduced advanced storage management technology into the heart of Microsoft Windows Servers. Storage Spaces has been enhanced with each major release of Windows and today includes a limited choice of software RAID options, virtual volumes that can be made up of one or more virtual disks and basic automated tiering of files between different types of physical disk assigned to a storage pool. These functions combined can be utilised to create a cost-effective in-house Windows based storage solution, all on standard server hardware, without purchasing expensive proprietary storage hardware from a vendor such as NetApp or Dell EMC.

However, Storage Spaces does have some limitations in functionality, scale and ease of management. For example, Storage Spaces is generally implemented using physical internal disks or JBODs attached directly to the Windows Server. This physical storage cannot be shared or utilised in raw form between Windows systems. Not allowing physical storage to be shared between Windows Servers dramatically increases storage costs, especially when an organisation’s requirement is greater than a couple of hundred terabytes. Scaling storage using traditional methods such as those implemented by Storage Spaces brings an additional challenge: the more data retained, the more data that must be protected using legacy or cloud backup solutions. And, we all know that can introduce complexity and quickly burn through capital and operating resources.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a cost-effective, massively scalable central pool of modern self-healing storage that can be tiered to by all of your Storage Spaces—allowing you to provision just enough high-performance local storage such as SSDs to meet hot data needs?

These types of storage challenges are something that we are quite familiar with at Caringo and that we work to solve for our customers all over the globe. When we originally launched FileFly in 2015, this was top of mind for us. Since then, FileFly has been awarded 4.9 out of 5 stars by Brien Posey in his TechGenix Review (read the review) and received the Silver Award in the TechTarget’s Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com 2017 Product of the Year Data Storage Management Tools category (as detailed in our blog).

By combining Storage Spaces with award-winning Caringo FileFly, you can now scale from TBs to 100s of PBs at a fraction of the cost. FileFly will also protect all of that data, further decreasing costs by reducing your reliance on backup. On March 27, Caringo VP of Marketing Adrian “AJ” Herrera and I will present a webinar with strategies, a live demo and use cases for re-architecting your storage by combining a secure tier of storage that is easy to expand and manage, and that has continuous data protection built in. Join us during the live webinar and feel free to bring your questions. We will have live Q&A throughout the presentation. Or, watch on demand at your convenience.

Register Now

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