Microsoft: More on Windows 8's coming drive-extender-style storage
Summary: Microsoft officials have delivered a few more details on Windows 8's Storage Spaces, a technology similar to the drive extender component that was cut from Windows Home Server last year.
Many Windows Home Server fans were irate over Microsoft's decision to pull the drive extender technology from the latest version of that product in 2011. But drive extender is coming back -- sort of -- with Windows 8.
In a January 5 blog post on the "Building Windows 8" blog, Microsoft officials shared more background on the Windows 8 Storage Spaces technology that works in many ways like drive extender. Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on the Storage and File System team, who is the author of the post, noted the similarities between the "deprecated" drive extender technology and the coming Storage Spaces:
"(S)ome of us have used (or are still using), the Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology which was deprecated. Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution, but it does deliver on many of its core requirements. It is also a fundamental enhancement to the Windows storage platform, which starts with NTFS."
Storage Spaces will work with a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacenter (this storage technology also part of Windows Server 8, as ITWriting's Tim Anderson noted). Storage Spaces is what will allow users to organize heterogeneous physical disks into storage pools and/or virtual disks (which Microsoft calls "Spaces"). PowerShell, Microsoft's scripting tool, can be used to manage Storage Spaces.
Other tidbits from the Storage Spaces post:
- Users can continue to use their existing storage solutions with Windows 8 if they'd prefer.
- With Storage Spaces, disks can be connected through USB, Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
- There is no tool (or plans for one) for migrating data from the Windows Home Server's Drive Extender format to Storage Spaces. Data can be copied over to a Windows 8 PC.
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Talkback
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Seeing is believing
2011 Windows Home Server Vail (one disk only)
2012 "Storage Spaces will work with a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacentre."
Colour me sceptical.
How I love to be wrong!
... but it does sound great!
... never thought I'd see it happen :-)
Wouldn't it be nice if M$ got their mojo back?
Let's not forget of course that Drive Extender didn't work. Fingers crossed here.
Got me thinking about a WHS replacement...
I think there is a market ...
... for a Windows 8 Personal Cloud edition, which combines a Windows 8 PC and Windows Home Server into a desktop. I think small businesses, professionals, and many homes would get it. People would be able to use it as a desktop, and have it function as a personal cloud server at the same time. Users wouldn't have to worry that much about privacy, drive capacity, etc. This product should have much more appeal than Windows Home Server, because I believe the name 'Server' in consumer products freaks people out - and consumers prefer things integrated into products.
RE: Microsoft: More on Windows 8's coming drive-extender-style storage
Right, but knowing MS
RE: Microsoft: More on Windows 8's coming drive-extender-style storage
negative
Would you really need the drive extender under windows environment ? Just add a drive (or controller and drive) and make a new share. Something that you can achieve even with Server 2003 ( even with Win 2000 or NT server .. with some limitations).
I hope they get your drive extender functionality right with server 2012. Forget about Win 8 – it’s not a server and it most probably has a connections limitations. You can use it at home with a single client, maybe.
Same drive-extender functionality is available in all linux distributions through LVM since ages. Get a ZFS and you get all you were dreaming of.
My servers are under linux or win 2003 (where it is required). Would not move to any new Microsoft solution until they deliver a stabile solution, that would not be driven obsolete next day, just because they change the kernel and they name it a Windows Future Server.