Redmond, Washington — Software monopolists Microsoft Corp., has opened its heart to share plentiful of space is now planning to improve the storage performance of its yet-to-be launched Windows 8 operating system, dubbed as “Storage Spaces,” a feature that “Pools” multiple physical disks designed to both protect data and organize physical drives for efficient data storage.
Over the weekend, in a posting on the “Building Windows 8” blog, Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on the Windows Storage and File System team, provides detail on the next-gen platform’s new Storage Spaces feature describing the two overarching themes behind Storage Spaces: one, the ability to organize multiple physical disks into storage pools, and two, the use of virtual disks (which he refers to as “spaces”).
Storage Spaces continues the Drive Extender theory from Windows Home Server, allowing the system to pool physical hard drives of varying sizes and interfaces to redundantly store data for scale, resiliency, and efficiency. Hence, Windows 8 user will required only one physical disk to create a storage pool, although this approach will avert the creation of mirrored or parity spaces capable of data redundancy in the event of some catastrophic failure. According to Nagar, there is “no requirement for an even or odd number of physical disks.”
Windows 8 includes a storage scheme well-suited for business deployment that can treat hundreds of disks as a single logical storage reservoir and ensures resiliency by backing up data on at least two physical disks. Pools are considered as a single virtual disks that can be partitioned and formatted as if they are single physical disks, which can then be connected via different interfaces such as USB, SATA (Serial ATA) or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), Nagar added.
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The new feature, dubbed as “Storage Spaces,” will embrace a physical storage facility to create data pools. Thanks to something termed as thin provisioning, hence these virtual disks raw storage capacity have the ability to transform 4TB of memory space into 10TB raw storage capacity translates into a much larger mirrored space—in the blog’s example, some 4TB of raw physical space transforms into 10TB of capacity once it has been added to the pool.
In fact, the range of a virtual space does not necessarily harmonizes with the total capacities of the physical drives within a pool. The example given is that a “Documents” Space could be set at 10TB whereas the actual physical drives in the “My Home Storage” Pool only has 4TB capacity.
Storage Spaces has advantages that make it well-suited for business deployments, writes the author of the blog, Nagar. “Storage Spaces delivers on diverse requirements that can span deployments ranging from a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacenter,” Nagar writes.
“Thin provisioning ensures that actual capacity is reserved for the space only when you decide to use it,” he wrote. “Previously assigned physical capacity can be reclaimed safely whenever files are deleted, or whenever an application decides that such capacity is no longer needed.”
The system functions like a RAID setup but the actual hard drives are assembled into a larger storage pool, which is then split up into spaces. The disks in a pool can be of mismatched sizes and of different interface technologies as described above. Also, new disks can be appended anytime while others can be connected but kept on standby only to turn on when needed.
When the Windows 8 beta version is available sometime within the next month or so, it will include a Storage Spaces configuration tool. Those who want to try it out in the currently available developers preview must use PowerShell.
Windows 8 is the next version of the Windows operating system, now schedule for beta release in February. It is believed to be generally available later next year featuring touch-screen navigation and commands as well as support for tablets. Not all apps that run on Windows 7 will be compatible with the touch-screen capabilities, but mouse and keyboard devices will enable all apps that ran on Windows 7.
Nevertheless, Microsoft will almost certainly offer further glimpses of Windows 8 during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is slated to kick off with a Jan. 9 keynote speech by CEO Steve Ballmer.