NYC IT Consulting Firm
Storage Spaces Direct
Torrington, CT
Proudly serving Torrington for over 20 years
W. O’Donnell Consulting is a trusted local Storage Spaces Direct consultant in the Torrington, CT area. We provide Storage Spaces Direct support, consulting, implementation, and customization services to help our clients enjoy the many benefits of this cost-efficient storage solution. Contact us today for a free consultation.
Benefits of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Solutions
Microsoft’s Storage Spaces Direct, or S2D, offers cost-efficient, software-defined storage, making it an enhanced alternative to traditional SAN technologies. Here’s why your organization should consider implementing this storage solution.
Overview of Microsoft's Storage Spaces Direct
S2D is the evolution of Microsoft Storage Spaces, a feature first introduced in Microsoft Server 2012. S2D leverages and aggregates local drive storage to support Microsoft’s software-defined storage solution. More than 10,000 server clusters use S2D globally.
S2D can be deployed using either a converged or hyper-converged approach. Under the converged or disaggregated deployment type, the environment is separated into compute and storage components, while there is no such separation of resource pools under the hyper-converged approach.
Benefits over traditional SAN technologies
There are several similarities between Storages Spaces Direct and traditional storage area network (SAN) technologies. For instance, S2D and traditional SAN technologies both utilize Hyper V virtualization technology. Additionally, S2D can be run from Powershell like many traditional SANs.
However, Microsoft’s S2D solution offers several key advantages over traditional SAN solutions. Some of the benefits of Storage Spaces Direct include:
- Performance: S2D offers low latency due to its hypervisor-embedded architecture and exceeds 150,000 IOPS for maximum performance.
- Scalability: S2D supports up to 400 drives and 16 servers and each cluster can support an entire petabyte, meaning that adding drives or supports to support growth is easy.
- Availability: S2D enables building highly available (HA) storage systems with local storage for optimal uptime and supporting continuous operations.
- Cost-efficiency: S2D is less expensive and brings costs down for most organizations while still delivering strong storage performance.
- Hardware failure resilience: Nested resiliency is a new capability of S2D for Windows Server 2019 that allows a server cluster to withstand multiple hardware failures and remain online and accessible.
Implementation tips and best practices
Fortunately, getting started with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is a simple process, but following these tips can help you avoid common deployment errors and make the process as seamless as possible:
- Carefully review the S2D technical requirements and ensure that all hardware components, systems, devices and drivers are Windows 2016 certified.
- Take note of which RDMA networking protocol is used by the network adapters.
- Creating a failover cluster is an important step, but first make sure that all server nodes are identically configured.
- Use Windows Powershell to manually add a server to the list of trusted hosts in the event of a process request error, especially during remote deployment.
- Conform to a standard approach to server naming for individual resources such as computers, files and paths as well as domain naming and joining to ensure consistency.
- Consult the Windows Deploy Storage Spaces Direct webpage for more best practices.
Storage Spaces Direct offers powerful and effective storage capabilities for modern enterprises. To learn more about the benefits of this solution, contact W. O’ Donnell Consulting today. Our team of experienced Storage Spaces Direct consultants provide the technical guidance your organization needs for optimal implementation and customization of your S2D solution.
Free Consultation and Discussion
Contact us today for a free consultation to learn more about how this solution can help your organization be more productive and efficient.
Microsoft Azure Backup
- Scale easily with no storage limits
- No costly appliance to support and maintain
- Data is encrypted in transit and at rest
- Resilience via Locally Redundant Storage, Geo-redundant storage, or Zone-redundant storage
- Application consistent backups
Microsoft Terminal Server
Benefits of Microsoft Ternminal Server/Remote Desktop Services:
- Delivers a consistent application experience to remote staff
- Provides a single point of maintenance
- Secure access via web, gateway, or session broker
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