This document summarizes the key capabilities and features of Windows Server 2012 storage and virtualization technologies. It discusses how Storage Spaces provides enterprise-class features on less expensive hardware by virtualizing storage. Features like storage tiers, online deduplication, SMB 3.0, and ReFS are highlighted. The document also shows how these features integrated with Windows Server capabilities like Hyper-V and Failover Clustering provide highly available, scalable, and resilient storage platforms.

1. Michael Rüefli
Cloud Architect
INSERTO AG, Switzerland
Email: michael.rueefli@inserto.ch
Twitter: @drmiru
Blog: www.miru.ch
2012 R2

2. • Costs (CapEx) per I/O vs. per GB
• Complexity (OpEx)
• Performance
• Scalability

3. SEQUENTIAL Access
RANDOM Access

4. • Storage Spaces
• Storage Tiering
• Scaleout File Server
• SMB 3.0
• Online Deduplication
• Encryption
• Big Data (ReFS)
• Ease of Management
• Automation
• VHDX Sharing

6. • Virtualization of storage with
Storage Pools and Storage
Spaces
• Storage resilience and
availability with commodity
hardware
• Resiliency and data
redundancy through
n-way mirroring (clustered or
unclustered) or parity mode
(unclustered)
• Utilization optimized through
thin and trim provisioning and
enclosure awareness
• Integration with other
Windows Server 2012
capabilities
• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
and Serial AT Attachment
(SATA) interconnects
Windows
Virtualized
Storage
Windows Application Server or File Server
Physical or
virtualized
deployments
Physical
Storage
(Shared) SAS or SATA
Integrated
with other
Windows
Server 2012
capabilities
Storage PoolStorage Pool
File Server Administration
Console
Hyper-V
Cluster Shared Volume
Failover Clustering
SMB Multichannel
NFS Windows Storage Mgmt.
NTFS SMB Direct
Storage Space Storage Space Storage Space
ENTERPRISE-CLASS FEATURES ON
LESS EXPENSIVE HARDWARE

7. Mirror
Space
Mirror
Space
Parity
Space
Mirror
Space

8. 2-Way MIRROR SPACE
STORAGE POOL
SIMPLE SPACE
Simple
Space
2-Way Mirror
Space
3-Way Mirror
Space
Parity Space Dual Parity
Space
Number of
data copies
1 2 3 2 + Parity 3 + Parity
Number of
columns
(default)
# Disks # Disks / 2 # Disks / 2 # Disks # Disks
Interleafe
(default)
256KB 256KB 256KB 256KB 256KB
PARITY SPACE

9. Storage Space
Performance improvements
to radically reduce MTTR
Rebuild Metric Measurement
Data Rebuilt 2,400 GB
Time Taken 49 min
Rebuild Throughput > 800 MB/s
3TB HDDs, 2-way, 4-column Mirror Space
Source: Internal Testing, No Foreground Activity

12.  ReFS File System
 Greater compatibility
with SATA standards
 Resilience against
power outage
corruption
 Online corruption
recovery
 Implements on-disk
structures, such as
the Master File Table,
to represent files and
directories.
New Storage Capabilities with Resilient File System (ReFS)
Scale to
PetaByte+

13. • Rapid recovery from file system corruption without
affecting availability
• Resilient against power outage corruption
• Periodic checksum validation of file system metadata
• Improved data integrity protection
• Ideal for file server volumes
• Compatible with CSV
• If used as Hyper-V VM Storage, file stream integrity has
to be disabled
NTFS improvements
• Rapid recovery from file system corruption without affecting
availability
• Data corruption virtually eliminated through allocate-on-write
• Period checksum validation of file system meta-data
• Seamless data integrity protection
CHKDSK
• Seconds to fix corrupted data
• No offline time when used with CSV
• Disk scanning process separated from repair process
• Online scanning with volume and offline repair
CONTINUOUS
APPLICATION
AVAILABILITY
0
100
200
300
400
100 Million Files 200 Million Files 300 Million Files
Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2012
Source: “Microsoft Internal Testing"

17. Cold DataHot Data

18. Cold DataHot Data

20. Complements Tiering
Seamless Integration &
Management
Hyper-V Compute Nodes
Cold Data
& WBC
Hot Data
Reads/Writes
Accumulates
Data Activity

22. Balanced
• Mix of HDD & SSD
• High Capacity
HDDs
• High Performance
SSDs
• Best IOPS/$
• Meet
• Miss
• Miss
• Meet
• Meet
• Meet
Option Capacity IOPS Cost
SSD Only
(45)
16 TB ~1’000’000 $63,000
Mixed
(8 + 4)
19.6 TB ~200’000 $8’000

23. Hyper-V Hosts 4
Storage Nodes 2
Hyper-V RAM 1,2 TB
Storage Capacity (SSD) 700 GB (dual mirroring)
Storage Capacity (SAS) 7 TB (dual mirroring
Storage Access Protocol SMB3 Multi-Channeling (2 x 10Gbps)
Max. write IOPS (8K, 100 % random) / Max. Troughput 180’000 / 1022 MB/s
Max. read IOPS (8K, 100% random) / Max. Troughput 220’000 / 1100 MB/s
Total CapEx $ 97’000.-

24. >200’000 IOPS
>2GB/s Throughput
<100K CHF

27. Industry standard commodity storage hardware
See www.windowsservercatalog.com under the “Storage Spaces” Category

28. • Only use Enterprise SSDs for productive Workloads
• Check and Respect HCL (end-to-end)
• Calculate your required Tier Sizes
• Leave Spare Space on Pools for Rebuilds

30. VHD Library
Software Deployment
Share
General File
Share
User Home Folder
(My Docs)
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Average savings with Data Deduplication by workload type
ENTERPRISE-CLASS
FEATURES ON LESS
EXPENSIVE HARDWARE
Maximize capacity by removing
duplicate data
• 2:1 with file shares, 20:1 with virtual
storage
• Less data to back up, archive, and
migrate
Increased scale and performance
• Low CPU and memory impact
• Configurable compression schedule
• Transparent to primary server workload
Improved reliability and integrity
• Redundant metadata and critical data
• Checksums and integrity checks
• Increase availability through redundancy
Faster file download times with
BranchCache
Source: “Microsoft Internal Testing"

35. • Continuously Available
Storage Platform
• Cluster Shared Volume
Hyper-V Compute Nodes
Mirror
7 6 8 G b / s S h a r e d S A S L i n k s
MirrorMirror Dual Parity
SMB SMB

36. Hyper-V Compute Nodes
768Gbps Shared SAS Links 768Gbps Shared SAS Links 768Gbps Shared SAS Links768Gbps Shared SAS Links
SMB SMBSMB
Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror
…

38. http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/solution-overview/h11912-vnx-with-ms-smb-3.0-
so.pdf

39. • Top-to-bottom performance analysis and
tuning
• Windows Server 2012 at 98% of DAS
transactional perf
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
4000
4500
SMB SMB + DAS
1175 (27%)
4270 (98%) 4315 (100%)
SQL TPC-C transactions/second

40. SMB
client
SMB
server
File
copy
NIC NIC
NIC NIC
File
copy
• Automatic detection and use of multiple network
connections between SMB client and server
• Helps server applications be resilient to network
failure
• Transparent Failover with recovery of network
failure if another connection is unavailable
• Improved throughput
• Bandwidth aggregation through NIC
Teaming
• Multiple nodes/CPUs for network
processing with RSS-capable network
adapters
• Automatic configuration with very little
administrative overhead
CONTINUOUS
APPLICATION
AVAILABILITY

41. File Client
SMB
Buffer
File Server
With RDMAWithout RDMA
App
Buffer
SMB
Buffer
OS
Buffer
Driver
Buffer
SMB
Buffer
OS
Buffer
Driver
Buffer
App
Buffer
SMB
Buffer
rNIC*rNIC* NIC
Adapter
BufferNICAdapter
Buffer
Adapter
Buffer
Adapter
Buffer
iWARP
InfiniBand
ENTERPRISE-CLASS
FEATURES ON LESS
EXPENSIVE HARDWARE
• Higher performance
through offloading of
network I/O processing
onto network adapter
• High throughput with
low latency and ability to
take advantage of high-
speed networks (such as
InfiniBand and iWARP)
• Remote storage at the
speed of direct storage
• Transfer rate of around
50 Gbs on a single NIC
port
• Compatible with SMB
Multichannel for load
balancing and failover
*Remote Direct Memory Access *e.g. Intel® NetEffect™ Server Cluster Adapter Family

42. • Highly available, shared
data store for SQL Server
databases and Hyper-V
workloads
• Increased flexibility, and
easier provisioning and
management
• Ability to take advantage
of existing network
infrastructure
• No application downtime
for planned maintenance
or unplanned failures with
failover clustering
• Highly available scale-out
file server
• Built-in encryption
support
File Server
Cluster
Cluster Shared Volumes
Single File System Namespace
SMB
Single Logical Server FooShare
SAN
Windows
Virtualized
Storage
Physical
Storage
Storage PoolStorage Pool
Storage Space Storage Space Storage Space
ENTERPRISE-CLASS
FEATURES ON LESS
EXPENSIVE HARDWARE
Hyper-V Cluster
Microsoft
SQL Server

43. WindowsServerfileservercluster
foo1share1 foo2share1
fooshare
• High-performance, continually available
fileshares for business critical applications
• Failover transparent to server applications
with zero downtime and with only a small
I/O delay
• Support for planned moves, load balancing,
operating system restart, unplanned
failures, and client redirection (scale-out
only)
• Resilient for file and directory operations
• All servers involved should have Windows
Server 2012
CONTINUOUS
APPLICATION
AVAILABILITY

44. Scale-out File Server
SMB Direct
Hyper-V
VHD
50% improvement for
small IO workloads
Efficiency
Increased efficiency and density of hosting workloads
with small I/O’s such as OLTP database in a VM
Optimizes 40Gbps Ethernet and 56Gbps InfiniBand
Performance
50% improvement for small IO workloads with SMB
over RDMA
Increased 8KB IOPs from ~300K IOPS to ~450K IOPS
per interface

45. SMB
File Server 2File Server 1
Storage Spaces
SOFSShare2
Share1 Share2 Share1 Share2
CSV and SMB shares
automatically rebalanced
Improved network efficiency
through drastically reducing
redirection traffic

48. External Intelligent Storage Array
Virtual Disk Virtual Disk
Token
IMPROVED
PERFORMANCE,
MORE CHOICE
Benefits
• Rapid virtual machine provisioning and
migration
• Faster transfers on large files
• Minimized latency
• Maximized array throughput
• Less CPU and network use
• Performance not limited by network
throughput or server use
• Improved datacenter capacity and scale
Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)
Token-based data transfer between
intelligent storage arrays

50.  iSCSI network boot
 Typically used for
Hyper-V host boot
and HPC boot
 Rapid deployment
 Quick recovery
 Reduce capital
expenditures and
operating expenditures
 Ease of management
iSCSI Target Server with Network Boot

51. VHDX
Support
• Provision LARGER (up to 64TB) LUs
• Online expand/shrink of LUs
• Provision dynamically-growing LUs
SMI-S
Support
• Fully manage iSCSI Target Server using SMI-S
• Empowers full end-to-end management with
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Standards-based management
iSCSI Target Server
SCVMM
iSCSI Target Server is
highly scalable and
flexible using VHDX
Manage iSCSI Target
Server out-of-the-box
with SCVMM iSCSI Target Server
delivers a comprehensive
management experience

53.  Transparent
failover support
for NFS v3 or 4.1
clients
 UNIX, Linux, and
VMware support
 New RPC-XDR
runtime
infrastructure
and DLLs make
NFS failover
faster than ever

58. Volume Shadow Copy Service
fsfoo
Data volume
fsfoo@t1
Shadow Copy
Backup Server
Application Server File Server
File Share Shadow Copy Agent
Coordinate Shadow Copy
Create Shadow Copy
Create Shadow Copy
Request Shadow Copy
VSS Providers
BackupA
B
C
D
E
Read from
Shadow Copy
Share
G
Relay
Shadow
Copy
request
Backup Agent
Volume Shadow Copy Service
File Share Shadow Copy Provider
F

60. • Dramatically simplifies VM
guest clustering
• No vSAN or passthru disks
required
• Attach a highly available VHDX
to multiple VMs
• Supported on CSV and SMB
3.0 Scaleout Share
• Supported on standalone and
clustered Hyper-V hosts

63. • Windows Server for NAS appliances that
are preconfigured and enterprise ready
• Ideal file-based storage solution that is
fault tolerant, continuously available,
scalable, and cost effective
• Workgroup and Standard editions
• Multiple vendors
Workgroup Standard
NAS Segments
Entry level
50 users
Scale up
Continuous availability
Architecture/maximum memory X64 – 32 GB X64 – 2 TB
Active Directory Lightweight
Directory Services
Yes Yes
CPU sockets/virtual machines 1 + 0 2 + 2
Hardware RAID Yes Yes
Disks 6, No external SAS Unlimited
iSCSI Software Target Yes Yes
File sharing (SMB/NFS) Yes Yes
Microsoft BitLocker Yes Yes
Data Deduplication No Yes
Hyper-V No Yes
BranchCache – Hosted Cache No Yes
Clustering No Yes
DHCP, DNS, and WINS No Yes
Active Directory DC, Certificate,
Federation, Rights Management,
Application Server, Network Policy,
Terminal Services, WDS, Fax Server
No No
IMPROVED
PERFORMANCE,
MORE CHOICE

64. Windows Cluster in a Box ODX SMB Direct
Quanta Computer
HP
Wiwynn
Violin Memory
Dell EqualLogic
IBM
HP
NetApp
Fujitsu
Intel
LSI
XyratexXio
EMC
Hitachi
Fujitsu
NEC
Mellanox
Intel
Chelsio
HA-DAS.com
Windows Storage Server 2012
DELL
XTORE
MaXXan
AREA
Western Digital
LACIE
Unibrain
CM
Compellent
Pyramid
Thomas-Krenn.AG
Broadberry
Pivot 3
N-TEC
AMAX
ABERDEEN
BOSCH
Acma
DNF
Storageflex
BUFFALO
Variel
WINCHESTER SYSTEM
Fujitsu
SIEMENS
IBM
HP
NEC
IMPROVED
PERFORMANCE,
MORE CHOICE

65. Certified Storage Spaces Hardware
High-Performance Servers and Storage
http://www.raidinc.com/ http://www.dataonstorage.com/http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/
http://www.quantaqct.com/ http://www.supermicro.com/

67. StorSimple's Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) has been helping customers do this for over a year now and proven it's mettle working in the data centers of large
enterprises. CiS on-premises SAN storage exports iSCSI LUNs to servers and connects on the back, or device, side to enterprise cloud storage for storing
snapshot, backup, archive and unstructured, dormant data. CiS is a hybrid SAN array having flash SSDs and hard disk layers but it adds a third slower, higher-
latency enterprise cloud storage storage layer. It’s 3-tier design is perfectly matched for managing the masses of unstructured data that IT workers wrestle with.

68. SSD
Deduplicated
SAS
Deduplicated
Compressed
Cloud
Deduplicated
Compressed
Encrypted
SSD
Linear TierA B C A B D E
C D E
D E
E

69. Scalability/Performance
Capacity
5520
10-50TB* usable local
300TB max capacity
7520
20-100TB* usable local
500TB max capacity
* Denotes usable local storage capacity with compression and de-duplication, varies by use case
* Additional details about appliance specifications can be found at: http://storsimple.xyratex.com/storsimple/specifications
5020
2-10TB* usable local
100TB max capacity
7020
4-20TB* usable local
200TB max capacity

70. Q&A

71. Thank You!
Michael Rüefli
Cloud Architect
INSERTO AG, Switzerland
Email: michael.rueefli@inserto.ch
Twitter: @drmiru
Blog: www.miru.ch
Walter Pitrof
Sr. Technology Solution Professional
Microsoft Switzerland
Email: walterp@microsoft.com