Today, Dell Announced Hardware Support for Storage Spaces in Windows Server

Today, Dell announced hardware support for Storage Spaces in Windows Server.

Over the past few months, you’ve seen this blog discuss how storage is changing, and explore new options for datacenter and hybrid storage. Microsoft is working to help customers transform the datacenter with the power of software, and Dell’s announcement is an important piece of that evolving story.

Storage Spaces virtualizes storage by grouping industry-standard disks into storage pools, enables the creation of virtual disks from those pools, and also provides more advanced features such as automatic storage tiering and disk resiliency.

Hardware components that work with Storage Spaces in Windows Server can deliver highly available, high-performance virtualized storage to important applications, including your Hyper-V deployments. Such deployments can achieve 1,000,000 IOPS or more, and endure the failures of disks or servers transparently – without interrupting service to the workload depending on that storage.

Dell’s announcement is an exciting development which will help more customers take advantage of the performance and availability of virtualized storage with Windows Server.

Dell is Microsoft’s largest OEM partner to have implemented support for Storage Spaces. Dell provides the most complete Storage Spaces implementation – server, controller, JBOD and disks form an end-to-end solution, and this support includes new features such as JBOD monitoring.

Supported hardware includes Dell’s PowerEdge Servers, cost-effective SAS 6Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs), persistent reservation HDDs and SSDs, and PowerVault MD1200 and MD1220 storage enclosures.

One type of business that can benefit from a Storage Spaces based solutions is service providers – a fast-growing industry, and one that’s always under pressure to deliver high quality service to their end customers, while controlling costs. Service providers can quickly deploy high performance, highly-available storage built on these Microsoft and Dell technologies.

You can read more about NTTX, one customer who has already taken advantage of these solutions.

Learn more about Dell’s announcement here.