Flexible HCI delivered as an Azure hybrid service
Azure Stack HCI is a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) operating system delivered as an Azure service that provides the latest security, performance, and feature updates. Deploy and run Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) in your datacenter or at the edge using your existing tools, processes, and skill sets. Extend your datacenter to the cloud with Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, and Azure Security Center.
An Azure Stack HCI deployment runs Hyper-V virtual machines or SQL Server databases directly on the servers providing the storage, storing their files on the local volumes. This eliminates the need to configure file server access and permissions and reduces hardware costs for small-to-medium sized businesses or remote office/branch office deployments.
Storage in a modern enterprise used to consist of traditional Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage arrays with shelves of drives. Azure Stack HCI storage enhancements bring revolutionary new features within reach of every organization with its software-defined feature set.
How it works
Storage Spaces Direct is the evolution of Storage Spaces, first introduced in Windows Server 2012. It leverages many of the features you know today in Windows Server, such as Failover Clustering, the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) file system, Server Message Block (SMB) 3, and of course Storage Spaces. It also introduces new technology, most notably the Software Storage Bus.
Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2019
Storage Spaces Direct uses 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. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance. Storage Spaces Direct is included in Windows Server 2019 Datacenter.
Simplicity
Go from industry-standard servers running Windows Server 2019 to your first Storage Spaces Direct cluster in under 15 minutes. For System Center users, deployment is just one checkbox.
Unrivaled Performance
Whether all-flash or hybrid, Storage Spaces Direct easily exceeds 150,000 mixed 4k random IOPS per server with consistent, low latency thanks to its hypervisor-embedded architecture, its built-in read/write cache, and support for cutting-edge NVMe drives mounted directly on the PCIe bus.
Fault Tolerance
Built-in resiliency handles drive, server, or component failures with continuous availability. Larger deployments can also be configured for chassis and rack fault tolerance. When hardware fails, just swap it out; the software heals itself, with no complicated management steps.
Resource Efficiency
Erasure coding delivers up to 2.4x greater storage efficiency, with unique innovations like Local Reconstruction Codes and ReFS real-time tiers to extend these gains to hard disk drives and mixed hot/cold workloads, all while minimizing CPU consumption to give resources back to where they're needed most - the VMs.
Manageability
Use Storage QoS Controls to keep overly busy VMs in check with minimum and maximum per-VM IOPS limits. The Health Service provides continuous built-in monitoring and alerting, and new APIs make it easy to collect rich, cluster-wide performance and capacity metrics.
Scalability
Go up to 16 servers and over 400 drives, for up to 1 petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of storage per cluster. To scale out, simply add drives or add more servers; Storage Spaces Direct will automatically onboard new drives and begin using them. Storage efficiency and performance improve predictably at scale.
How to manage - Windows Admin Center
Windows Admin Center is a new, locally-deployed, browser-based management tool set that lets you manage your Windows Servers with no Azure or cloud dependency. Windows Admin Center gives you full control over all aspects of your server infrastructure and is particularly useful for managing servers on private networks that are not connected to the Internet.
