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From initial reading, it looks like Microsoft's forthcoming "Storage Spaces" is an LVM-like tool for Windows.

Is this a correct assessment?

If it's not merely LVM-for-Windows, then what is it, and how could the approach be replicated on Linux/Unix?

warren
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1 Answers1

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There's nothing technologically new about Storage Spaces. They're just slapping a new coat of shellack on the same soft-RAID and VHD functionality that's currently in Win7/2008R2. They've coined a few new terms and simplified the configuration, but it's really nothing new and nothing to get excited about. Take a GPT Dynamic Disk, create some partitions (call them Pools), apply raid to taste (call it a storage policy), create some VHDs on them (rename Expanding VHDs as "Thin Provisioned")... You see where I'm going.

Chris S
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  • Since it has checksumming I was going to call it more ZFS like. RAID TMK doesn't do any kind of checksuming – TheLQ Jan 18 '12 at 02:35
  • "There's nothing technologically new about Storage Spaces"...with the exception of hot spares, if I'm not mistaken. – joeqwerty Jan 18 '12 at 02:41
  • @TheLQ That's part of the NTFS improvements, not Storage Spaces per-se. – Chris S Jan 18 '12 at 02:51
  • @joeqwerty you might have me there, though the vast majority of the functionality is in Windows already. I'd be more impressed if they put their efforts into functionality rather than the Oh Shiny interface. – Chris S Jan 18 '12 at 03:01
  • True enough, although having hot spare capability at the OS level sounds useful for home users. – joeqwerty Jan 18 '12 at 03:10
  • I can not agree with this statement. Storage Spaces is on higher level than this and this is notable when you have > 12 drives with very complex hybrid layout and multitiering. Instead of just different RAID types it denotes a particular layout, including how many copies should exist, what level of tolerance for parity and as a result - you are not doing low-level management when you need to migrate from old drive set no a new one. Also, you can extend existing set with new drives without much pain and full data copying. – Dmitry Gusarov Nov 05 '16 at 17:56
  • It solves a lot of scenarios out of the box, including automated transparent multitiering between SSD set and HDD to maximize performance and capacity per $. Also, as a primitive example, existing technologies weren't able to give 2 drive tolerance at all. – Dmitry Gusarov Nov 05 '16 at 17:56
  • Now you can mimicking RAID 10 using N columns with M data copies, but such layouts are available only from PowerShell. – Dmitry Gusarov Nov 05 '16 at 18:04
  • @Dimitry Gusarov: lvm and mdraid can do all of that since 10+ years. If some fancy UI lets you click "Next" while setting up complex hybrid storage layout than that's actually a con for at least two reasons - 1) source of limitations, annoyancies and bugs, 2) encouraging not to think about what you're doing. Complex hybrid setup and fancy colorful UI designed for uneducated masses with the 'Next' button? It's quite a contrast, that doesn't seem to go together well. – Zrin Mar 11 '17 at 12:43