Editor's note: This blog was published on behalf of Oliver Kaven, Storage Product Manager
This is Oliver Kaven from the Product Group storage team with some exciting news on our PowerVault NX NAS appliances with Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2012[MR1] . This month we will be releasing the R2 version of Windows Storage Server 2012 on all of our products—the NX400, NX3200 and NX3300.
A year ago, we released Windows Storage Server 2012 (WSS2012). The WSS2012 release is chock full of new features, including SMB3 (with SMB Direct & SMB Multichannel), NFSv4.1, Data Deduplication, Storage Spaces, Thin Provisioning, and more. Now, let’s take a look at what is new with R2:
On the storage side the most notable changes are around the SMB protocol; better SMB Direct performance, automatic rebalancing for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and Hyper-V Live Migration. Storage Spaces, a new storage virtualization technology that has received a lot of buzz has been extended, now offering SSD write-back cache, parity on failover clusters and dual parity.
Are you up to speed on the latest acronyms? If yes, then you have heard about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), a new challenge for today’s IT organizations. Work Folders, Microsoft’s new feature that enables users to access work files from their personal devices addresses this hot new trend, while letting organizations maintain centralized control over access policies.
Additional improvements have been made to Failover Clustering such as better virtual machine availability and enhancements to Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). Hyper-V now provides shared Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) and the capability to resize VHDs while a VM is running.
And finally, another hot new feature, data reduction, has been enhanced by including the so much needed support for Cluster Shared Volumes. If you are running a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) you can now dedupe your live VMs that are stored on a file server connected via SMB.
Bottom line, if you need a storage solution for enterprise home shares, Hyper-V workloads or need SMB3 capabilities, then Dell’s Windows Storage 2012R2 appliances running on our award winning PowerEdge server hardware can be an excellent fit. For more information, follow @Dell_Storage and let us know what you think of the R2.
[MR1]Product page link