To help deliver advanced, enterprise-class storage capabilities, Dell today has announced full support for Microsoft Storage Spaces, a new technology part of Windows Server 2012 R2. Utilizing Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage expansion, hosting companies, cloud providers, and datacenter engineers can now utilize Microsoft's software enabled storage capabilities to virtualize the storage stack.
In Windows Server 2012 R2, Storage Spaces allows the grouping of drives together into storage pools that appear as a single drive in File Explorer. Virtual disks can then be created using the storage pools. Much like storage mirroring, a virtual disk can be created from available resources across all available drives in the pool. This enables a virtual environment to automatically pull additional space, where needed, and helps virtual machines to continue running even in the event of a drive failure.
Using the Dell solution, the storage pool can actually be composed of a mixture of solid state drives and bulk hard disk drives and employs unique caching techniques to reduce impact on data transfer performance.
You can learn more about Dell PowerEdge servers here: Dell PowerEdge Portfolio
Read about Dell's PowerVault storage systems here: PowerVault Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
And, learn how to implement Storage Spaces in this document: Deploying Storage Spaces on PowerVault MD12XX
