In another article about Windows 8, Microsoft talk about Storage Spaces, which is a feature similar to that of the now dead Drive Extender technology from V1 of Windows Home Server.
This is how the article starts:
Windows 8 provides a new capability called Storage Spaces enabling just that. In a nutshell, Storage Spaces allow:
- Organization of physical disks into storage pools, which can be easily expanded by simply adding disks. These disks can be connected either through USB, SATA (Serial ATA), or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). A storage pool can be composed of heterogeneous physical disks – different sized physical disks accessible via different storage interconnects.
- Usage of virtual disks (also known as spaces), which behave just like physical disks for all purposes. However, spaces also have powerful new capabilities associated with them such as thin provisioning (more about that later), as well as resiliency to failures of underlying physical media.
Before we start exploring Storage Spaces in more detail, I will digress briefly to give you a little more context: some 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 delivers on diverse requirements that can span deployments ranging from a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacenter.
You can read the rest of the very interesting article here.
When I was testing the Developers Preview, Storage Spaces was part of the Windows Server 8 and not Windows 8 Client. Is this still the case ?
John–
Looks like both versions get this. Makes WHS look a little superflous if this works well. I asked on MSDN and will update this comment thread if they answer me.
Jim
I too am wondering where this puts WHS2011. I was waiting for hard drive prices to come back to normal levels before building a WHS2011 box but now I might be better off waiting for this. Will Storage Spaces be implemented in the WHS line in the near future? Will this be part of a service pack or a new version (Windows 8 Home Server?) that we will have to buy?
Thanks,
Joe
hi Joe
it’s hard to say – if there is a V3 of WHS then it might be based on Windows 8 server, in which case I would guess it would be in it – but I dont think we would see it for at least a year or two!
Andrew