Earlier this week, Dell announced support for Storage Spaces as provided by Windows Server.
Storage Spaces is a virtualization technology which groups disks into storage pools and allows for creation of virtual disks from that pool. It provides automatic storage tiering and disk resiliency.
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.
Together with the announcement Dell also released two papers which provide more information on how to setup Storage Spaces:
- Deploying Storage Spaces on PowerVault MD12XX-v1.docx
- Contains 32 pages, and provides guidelines for selecting the storage spaces compatible Dell hardware, firmware and information on supported storage configurations.
- SCSI Persistent Reservation (SCSI-PR) Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Spaces
- Which is a spreadsheet giving details on supported configurations for SCSI Persistent Reservation. If Storage Spaces technology is being deployed in Windows failover cluster configuration then all the disk drives must implement SCSI-PR.