Many MVP’s attended Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago to see what our future will look like.
Carsten published the “Hyper-V Amigo Chat” we did right after Ignite. The conference was a blast for us all. Tired but happy we chat about storage space direct, Nano Server, ReFS, Dedupe, Azure Stack, … Enjoy!
Here’s the link to the video Hyper V Amigos Chat – Microsoft Ignite 2015 on Carsten’s blog.
Microsoft sure knows how to keep the pressure on the storage industry. Both the traditional and the hyper converged crowd now have heard the gloomy tolling of that big doomsday bell once again. The offerings for 3rd party storage in the Wintel ecosystem will have to become better value for money once again in order to keep up or stay ahead.
I already wrote that here in TechEd 2013 Revelations for Storage Vendors as the Future of Storage lies With Windows 2012 R2 and poked some fun that the days of the easy big money in storage were over. Today storage vendors that do not adapt are going to feel that more than ever. One thing is for sure, there is no one size fits all and one trick ponies are not going to thrive. Microsoft now covers hyper converged, converged and centralized storage solutions. SMB Direct is the backbone for high throughput, low latency transport. If you haven’t done so you might just take a peek at SMB Direct now and study up on DCB (PFC/ETS). No worries … I have done a lot of “pioneer” work in the field on this. But unfortunately I could not present an end-to-end configuration of SMB Direct over RoCE session here at Ignite. But there are other opportunities.Storage replication completes the story while Storage QoS is giving is long needed control. So let the FUD fly, sit back and enjoy the show. Remember, when you’re catching lots of FLAK, you’re over your target 
If you need to see and find information on DELL storage fast they have a nice page on line with a virtual rack where you can look at the components of their various storage offerings.
They update it regularly and it’s a fast and easy way to get started. Naturally you’ll need to dive in a bit deeper or get some help to work out the last details. I’m like the Compellent as I have found it to be the best possible traditional storage solution for a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V environment and great value for money. I hope they can find a way to keep delivering that same value in the coming years in an ever changing storage landscape.
I’ve discussed the efforts Microsoft is putting into enhancing the storage offerings (Storage Spaces, SOFS, SMB) in its OS since Windows Server 2012 (R2) before in previous articles. In my last blog post on this subject Microsoft Keeps Investing In Storage Big Time I talked about their latest announcements around storage replica in the Windows Server Technical Preview.
In this post I’d like to show case how to set up server to server storage replication and demonstrate how to recover from certain events. We are doing this asynchronously as the scenario is one were we replicate a backup target off site to another city. Not an uncommon scenario and one that gives copies off site without introducing the cost & operational overhead of portable media.
The easiest way to show this without writing elaborate white papers is a video. I’ll wait with more elaborate writings or demo videos as things are bound to change a lot prior to RTM. After all we still only have the more then 3 month old Technical Preview bits. It’s important to realize what we are now getting in box with Windows Server aka the Cloud OS that used to require 3rd party solutions.
I hope to be doing some talks & presentations on this subject and in good tradition make those presentations demo heavy as I like to really show how technology in action.