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I’m Back, and Thinking About Storage

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I took a BUNCH off time off from blogging…but I’m back now and intend to share some cool new stuff around Windows Server 2012 R2 (preview at this point), starting with my experiments with Storage Spaces and Tiered storage.

First let me say that I hadn’t worked much with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012.  I didn’t have a compelling reason, since all of my existing servers already had RAID controllers or external SAN storage which did a pretty decent job of protecting data.  That changed in Windows Server 2012 R2 with the introduction of tiered storage!  This innovative little jewel allows you to vastly improve the performance of traditional spinning disks with the introduction and easy integration of faster SSD-based storage.

Over my next few posts I’ll try to make the following clear:

  • Details of my testing setup (kind of a silly hardware config!)
  • Basics of storage tiers in Windows Server 2012 R2
  • How to configure tiered storage
  • Benefits of a hybrid model

I’ll leave you with this for now.  I didn’t go out and make a big investment to build my flexible storage environment…I literally took some old parts off the shelf plus less than $90 to create a high-performance, multi-disk array which demonstrated better storage performance using the preview of Windows Server 2012 R2 than many large SAN arrays that I have used.

Where do I keep this monster performer of a storage array? Well, on my coffee table, of course!

Disk_Array