How do you manage Windows Server storage?

Other storage types available in Windows Server are 1)iSCSI. It provides block storage and leverages the existing Ethernet network. It uses the iSCSI protocol and useful for clients that cannot use SMB protocol. 2)Storage Spaces - This allows you to group three or more drives into a storage pool. It has inbuilt fault tolerance and helps to protect the data from drive failures. 3)Storage Spaces Direct - This combines internal storage on a cluster of physical servers into a software-defined pool of storage. It is highly scalable and fault tolerant. It can help to protect the data from drive or server failures.

As far as storage configuration is concerned, you also need to verify if multipathing is enabled if SAN storage is used. This could be either native multipathing or a 3rd party tool, like EMCs PowerPath.

Storage Spaces Direct enables you to combine internal storage on a cluster of physical servers into a software-defined pool of storage.The storage capacity can be scaled out by adding more drives or adding more servers in the cluster . Key Benefits include 1)High Performance - Provides low latency and high IOPS 2)Fault Tolerance - It has built in resiliency that can handle drive, server or component failures 3)Scalability - The cluster can scale up 16 servers and 400 drives for up to 4 petabyte storage per cluster

For monitoring storage, you can use File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) which can be installed as a role service in Windows Server. It can be used to manage and classify the data, set quotas on folders and create reports. It also allows File Classification. You can classify the files and apply policies based on this classification. There are various other storage monitoring applications that can also be used. If you use monitoring systems to monitor your entire infrastructure, it can also monitor storage resources and generate an alert when a storage issue is detected.

Data Deduplication is a feature to optimize storage and reduce storage costs. When it is enabled duplicated data is stored only once on the volume without compromising data integrity. The most common workloads where it can be used comprise File Servers, Backup Servers and VDIs. This feature can be installed from Server Manager or PowerShell. After installing it needs to be enabled. This can also be done from Server Manager or using PowerShell. A critical factor before enabling this feature is to evaluate if the dataset has enough duplication to benefit from it. For this we can use a tool called DDPEVal.exe (Data Deduplication Savings Evaluation Tool)

I’m a little surprised that data security isn’t its own section. While at-rest encryption solutions are fairly ubiquitous and perhaps don’t require much mention, Data Access Governance (DAG) is a highly nuanced discipline. Making sure that data stored is properly classified and only accessible by duly authorized personnel is often a real challenge requiring a purpose built automated solution with regular access review and certification.