Dell Storage with Microsoft Storage Spaces Best Practices Guide

• Storage pools — A group of physical disks, which allows you to manage and use the combined disk space of all physical disks in the pool.

• Storage Spaces — Virtual disks (VDs) created from free disk space in a storage pool. You can configure each Storage Space VD with a specific resiliency layout and storage tiers.

• Resiliency — Refers to the method by using which a VD is protected against physical disk failures. There are three types of resiliency layouts for Storage Spaces—Simple, Mirrored, and Parity.
  • Simple VD — Data is striped across the physical disks and there is no resiliency provided. There is no protection against physical disk failures.
  • Mirrored VD — Data is striped across physical disks and an extra one-or two copies of the data is also written to protect against disk failures. A two-way mirror can tolerate one physical disk failure, while a three-way mirror can tolerate up to two physical disk failures.
  • Parity VD — Data is striped across the physical disk along with parity information. There are two types of parity layouts—single parity and dual parity. Single parity writes one copy of parity information protecting against one hard drive failure, while dual parity writes two copies and protects against two hard drives failures.
• Storage tiers — Enables increased performance by creating and managing two separate data tiers — one SSD tier and one HDD tier. Frequently accessed data is stored on the high-speed SSD tier and less frequently accessed data is stored on the HDD tier.
• Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) — A role that enables a cluster to act as an active-active file server, which increases performance and provides highly available SMB file shares.
• Storage node — A server which is a member of the SOFS cluster.