Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Microsoft (www.microsoft.com | NASD:MSFT), the software giant for decades, continues to market an interesting extension to the famous Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Storage Spaces available since Windows Server 2012.
This extension named Storage Spaces Direct, aka S2D, is dedicated to Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and available with Windows Server 2016. S2D pools local disk storage and protects data with 2 additional copies, having globally a minimum of 3 copies to guarantee a high level of data durability. As of today, S2D supports 400 disks and 16 nodes (minimum 2 server with 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs each) and communication between nodes uses SMB3 including SMB Direct and Multichannel.


S2D provides also caching, storage tiering, erasure coding (parity spaces), supports of NVMe drives and requires RDMA. Two configurations exist: Hyper-Converged with a Scale-out File Server layer and a Disaggregated storage with Hyper-V and storage separated. Wow it makes HyperGrid, formerly Gridstore, irrelevant... really tough to compete against Microsoft...