Windows Server 2012 provides you a rich set of features that will help you maximize the returns from your storage investments. Read more about some of the key storage features in Windows Server 2012.
Key Features
  • Storage Spaces

    Storage Spaces provides a new class of sophisticated virtualization...

    Storage Spaces provides a new class of sophisticated virtualization enhancements to the storage stack that you can use to pool multiple physical hard disk units together and provide feature-rich, highly resilient, and reliable storage arrays to your workloads.
     
    You can use Storage Spaces to create storage pools, which are virtualized administration units that are aggregates of physical disk units. With these storage pools, you can enable storage aggregation, elastic capacity expansion, and delegated administration. You can also create virtual disks with associated attributes that include a desired level of resiliency, thin or fixed provisioning, and automatic or controlled allocation on diverse storage media.

  • Offloaded Data Transfers

    Offloaded Data Transfers (ODX) gives you the ability to leverage your...

    Offloaded Data Transfers (ODX) gives you the ability to leverage your investments in external storage arrays to offload data transfers from the server to those devices. While traditional transfers require data to route through servers, ODX bypasses this with a token-based mechanism for reading and writing data within or between intelligent storage arrays and frees up your network and CPU load.

  • SMB 3.0 Support for Server Workloads

    With enhancements to the server message block (SMB) protocol,...

    With enhancements to the server message block (SMB) protocol, Windows Server 2012 helps you to deploy Hyper-V virtual machines and SQL databases on SMB file shares. The Windows Server 2012 client and server are optimized for small random read/write I/O to increase performance for common server application workloads. This capability, in addition to SMB transparent failover and Clustered Share Volume enhancements, provides a reliable, cost-effective solution for your server workloads.

  • File System Enhancements

    Windows Server 2012 introduces a new file system, called Resilient File...

    Windows Server 2012 introduces a new file system, called Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is built for the future with significant investments that improve data integrity, availability, and scalability. Additionally, the NTFS file system has been enhanced to maintain data integrity when using cost-effective industry-standard SATA drives, provide online corruption scanning and repair capabilities that reduce the need to take volumes offline, and to provide significant improvements to Chkdsk that enable the identification and isolation of problems with specific files. This ensures that parts of the volumes are brought offline only for a matter of seconds as opposed to hours or days.

  • Storage Management

    To help tie all these storage capabilities together and simplify the...

    To help tie all these storage capabilities together and simplify the management of your increasingly complex storage environment, Windows Server 2012 introduces a new, unified interface that uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for comprehensive management of physical and virtual storage, including third-party external storage subsystems.
     
    The unified interface enables the use of WMI to provide a rich experience to IT pros via Windows PowerShell scripting, thereby providing a diverse set of solutions. It also enables management applications to use a single Windows API to manage different storage types by using a storage management provider or standards-based protocols such as Storage Management Initiative Specification. In addition, you can use the new File and Storage Services dashboard to manage storage across your entire datacenter from within Server Manager.

Storage Spaces

Read the Storage Spaces overview.

Overview

Learn more with the Server Message Block overview.

Benefits

See the benefits of Windows Server 2012 Storage.