(upbeat music)
- [Presenter] In this video we're gonna talk about
Windows Server 2016 and Storage Spaces Direct.
And we'll be covering some of the interesting concepts
around Storage Spaces Direct.
So the first thing is, what is it?
Well, it's the ability to use industry standard servers
with local-attached drives to create highly available,
highly scalable software-defined storage
at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays.
It can be used for converged
or hyper-converged architectures,
and we'll look at that.
And it achieves high performance by using caching,
storage tiers, and erasure coding
with technologies like NVMe drives and RDMA.
And then, storage Spaces Direct is included in
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition.
If we look at the entire stack
before we get into some of the specifics.
I'm gonna start at the bottom
where you have this storage pool,
which can have a mix of drive types.
The next layer is the software storage bus.
And there's actually a lot of
intelligence in this storage bus.
And we'll see some of the effects
it can have on the storage pool.
And then we've got your physical cluster
with the networking, so you've got ethernet,
generally high speed ethernet,
10 gigabit or 40 gigabit a second.
And also RDMA is in that layer.
And then the storage spaces software,
the storage spaces technology.
And then on top of that, you've got the cluster volumes.
And the cluster volumes are
basically where the shares reside,
and those shares are exposed on the network
so that the physical servers with the workloads
can mount those shares or access those shares
and then get to the storage below.
Though in a converged environment,
the storage and compute or in different clusters.
That layers a scale-out file server
atop Storage Spaces Direct,
and then provides network-attached storage
using the SMB3 file shares.
And it really is for highly scalable environments
for service providers and also enterprises.
You can see that you've got
the Storage Spaces Direct on the bottom,
and all the shares and the scale-out file system on top,
and then the actual servers, the hyper-v workloads,
SQL server workloads,
what's ever in those servers accessing that storage.
Which storage just looks like a big pool of storage.
It could be one big C drive, if that's what you wanted.
And we'll look at how that done in a moment.
And there's also a hyper-converge.
So there's one cluster for compute and storage.
It runs the workload directly on
the servers providing the storage,
so the storage is in those servers as well.
And it stores file son local volumes,
as opposed to volumes over the network.
And that creates a local storage pool
for hyper-v and other workloads.
Now let's switch gears and get a little more detailed
on the drive types and some of the combinations.
So the drives types NVMe,
non-volatile memory express drives,
that can be connected directly to the PCIE bus.
And then there's SATA and SAS SSDs,
and then herd disk drives, or spinning disk.
And you can also create multi-drive environment.
In deployments with multiple types of drives,
Storage Spaces Direct automatically uses
all drives of the fastest type for caching.
We'll talk more about caching,
but the system caches data on behalf of the application.
And the remaining drives are used for capacity.
Which type is fastest is determined
according to the hierarchy.
So NVMe, obviously, is fastest, then SSD,
and then hard disk drives.
And there's a number of all-flash deployment possibilities.
So all-flash deployments aimed to
maximize storage performance
do not include the rotational hard disk drives.
So you can create all-flash environments if you want.
On the left, you can see an all NVMe environment,
or you can have NVMe for the caching of the SSD drives,
or you can just have SSDs.
And hybrid deployments are possible as well.
So hybrid deployments aim to balance
performance and capacity, or to maximize capacity
and generally include rotational hard disk drives, or HDDs.
In this case, on the left you have
the NVMe environment first, NVMes for cache
and then the hard disk drives are for capacity.
Or you can have SSDs for cache
and hard disk drives for capacity.
Or you can have NVMe and then SSDs
and hard disk drives for capacity,
if that how you want it configured.
And a quick look at the cache drive summary.
So we have deployment, cache drives,
capacity drives, and cache behavior.
For deployment, if it's all NVMe,
there are no cache drives, right?
You don't have a higher speed drive in the system,
they're all high speed.
And the capacity drives are NVMe,
the cache behavior is write only.
And then if it's all SSD,
there are no cache drives in that case,
the capacity drives are SSDs as well,
and it can be just write only.
And then NVMe plus SSD, the cache drives are NVMe,
the capacity drives are SSD,
and that's generally write only,
and I'll show you an example.
And then NVME plus the hard disk drives,
you would use NVMe for the cache,
the capacity would be the hard disk drives,
and that can be read and write,
because it's coming out of the NVMe drives.
And then SSD plus hard disk drives,
the SSD would be the cache drive,
the capacity drive would be the hard disk drive,
and you can do read and writes out of the SSDs for cache.
And then NVMe plus SSD plus HDD,
the cache drives would be the NVMe,
and the capacity drives would be
the SSD and the hard disk drives.
And you can do a read and write for the hard disk drives,
and then write only for the SSD, in terms of cache behavior.
And you can set the cache behavior manually,
but it's also automatic by default.
On the left hand side here,
you can see the NVMe going to SSDs.
And like I mentioned in the previous slide,
the only writes are cached.
So you would cache the write via the NVMe,
but reads are not, so you would read directly from the SSD.
Now, in a hybrid environment,
where you've got SSDs that front
and hard disk drives, spinning disks,
then the writes are cached
and the reads are cached as well.
So there's no direct read into Storage Spaces Direct
if you're using hard disk drives.
And then a quick look at automatic cache
and drive failover.
So if you have a SSD that fails,
obviously some drives don't have cache,
and the system will automatically balance that out.
And here's another example,
you have an SSD that goes down,
the drives aren't accessible,
another SSD takes it's place
and then those drives are accessible.
Drive bindings are dynamic as well.
You can see here you've got NVMe drives
that are bound to these hard disk drives.
Well what happens if you wanna add more drives?
Well, now you don't have an appropriate relationship,
and so you want a cache drive
to hard disk drive or capacity drive ratio that makes sense.
In this case, it's showing that it goes from one to two,
and one to two doesn't work if you add more drives,
so then it has to go to one to three,
and as you add more drives it goes to one to four.
You can also add other NVMe drives
and keep the same ration.
Meaning, a one to two ratio,
if that eventually what you want.
But this video's just showing you
what the ratios could and should be.
For the server architecture,
what's important here is this is
somewhat of a different look than in the previous slides
where you can see storage spaces then cache and capacity.
Well one of the keys here
is that there is a three way mirror.
So you're getting a replication automatically.
Now you can see that it's replicating to various drives
in the different servers in the cluster.
And that's very important and it's very much like Azure.
If you know, Azure has a concept called Fort Knox,
and one of the first things it does
is triple replication of data.
And this is the same type of technology
brought to on-premises infrastructure.
So that was just a few of
the cool features of Storage Spaces Direct.
So in summary, you can use low cost commodity servers
and Windows Server 2016 Datacenter
to create fully featured storage arrays.
And then multiple drive types can be used,
we talked about NVMe, SSDs and hard disk drives.
And then multiple drive
and cache configurations are possible as well.
And then many of the caching aspects are automatic
and fault tolerant and can be manually configured as well,
if that's what you wanna do.
And then the server architecture
creates redundant data availability.
And with that, I wanna thank you for watching,
and I hope that was informative
around Storage Spaces Direct.