Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #5: Software-defined storage

This is the fifth post in the “Ten Reasons You’ll Love Windows Server 2016” videos by Matt McSpirit, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft.

In this episode Matt interviews Elden Christensen, a Principal Program Manager in the Windows Server product group. Elden and his team bring the high availability and file services to the Windows Server platform. Notably the team produces several of the enterprise grade features for clustering, failover, file services for scale out file server (SOFS) and server message block (SMB) technology.

Windows Server 2016 contains the next evolution of software defined storage from Microsoft: Storage Spaces Direct, Storage Replica, and Storage Quality of Service. Using these functions, operators are able to increase performance, lower storage costs and align deployment topology to business scenarios, without introducing risk to operations. Previously these features were exclusive to the storage industry vendors, and they charged a premium for them. Storage Spaces Direct enables operators to combine commodity hardware with sophisticated availability software at the operating system level, providing great performance for virtual machines. Storage Replica completes the scenario for stretch clusters, and replicates data at the volume level in either synchronous or asynchronous modes; now also available as a feature in your server operating system. Storage QoS makes it easy to guard against poor performance in a multitenant environment, allowing for reliable min and max performance levels.

Each of these capabilities can be deployed and managed using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

You can download the latest technical preview of Windows Server 2016 to try out the scenarios for yourself. Check out the Server Storage at Microsoft blog to double-click on any of the topics in the video.

Get more updates on Windows Server 2016 by following the Windows Server team (@WindowsServer) and Matt (@mattmcspirit) on Twitter.

Check out the other posts in this series:

• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #1: PowerShell and DSC
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #2: Active Directory and Identity
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #3: Server Management Tools
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #4: Remote Desktop Services
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #6: Software-defined Compute
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #7: Software-defined Networking
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #8: Security
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #9: Containers
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #10: Nano Server