The Home Server Show interviewed DataCore’s Carlos Carreras this week about their forthcoming storage pooling add-in for Windows Home Server 2011. As revealed back in February, the Enterprise storage specialist was approached by Microsoft late last year to look at ways of replicating some of the Drive Extender features that have been removed from Windows Home Server 2011.
The company subsequently announced support for Windows Home Server some weeks later but there has been little detail on which features from Datacore’s Enterprise software would be enabled for Windows Home Server users, and indeed, how the software’s storage pooling capabilities would work. In the course of this week’s interview, some of those questions were answered. Here’s the 30 second view on what we learned:
- The Datacore storage pooling add-in is set for a public beta release in May with a full release by the second quarter of 2011 (ie. end of June).
- The add-in will be distributed via OEMs predominately, but DataCore are investigating ways to sell the add-in directly to consumers too.
- Pricing has not been revealed, but is going to be “commensurate” with other WHS software pricing.
- The add-in enables a “performance” storage pool to be created by striping data across a RAID 0 array.
- Alternatively a second “protected” storage pool can be created via a RAID 1 mirror for your data.
- The add-in will manage adding and removing drives from the storage pool.
- An additional disk I/O performance feature will also be enabled to optimise media streaming performance. This is achieved by reserving 256 MB of your home server’s RAM for disk caching.
- Drives of varying size can be used, but a storage pool will be formatted to a multiple of the lowest common denominator (ie. your smallest drive capacity). The remaining drive capacity will not be available for usage in v1 of the add-in, but Datacore are investigating the ability to recover some of the drive space for a future release.
- No drive balancing technology is used to migrate data between drives in the pool – data will be written to drives on a “round robin” basis.
- In the case of a server crash, the storage pool can be removed and slotted into another Windows Home Server 2011 build with Datacore’s add-in installed and data can be accessed.
- Should a drive be in the process of failing, the add-in will detect this by the need to attempt to write data multiple times to the disk. Should a disk fail, the add-in will switch writing to the mirrored drive seamlessly.
- All types of internal drive (SSD, SATA, IDE) are supported, including 3TB drives. Adding external USB drives is technically possible, but not recommended for performance reasons. Microsoft’s 2TB backup partition limit for server backup is not affected.
- All management features will be available via the Windows Home Server Dashboard – there will be no controls in the Launchpad or remote website at launch.
- Virtualisation is supported across all of the major hypervisors.
- Expect to see support for Windows Small Business 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, potentially with varying feature sets. The business SKUs may get Remote Replication for offsite duplication.
- Support for RAID 5 is being investigated for the future, but won’t be available in the first two releases of the add-in (at least).
- Other Enterprise-grade features, including real-time Continuous Data Protection (the ability to backup in real-time and restore a snapshot from an exact time) are being evaluated for inclusion in a future release.
Whilst the add-in’s initial feature set is relatively limited (and comes with a few age-old RAID-related issues), DataCore mentions an evolving roadmap several times in the course of the interview – hopefully that will translate into additional features and enhancements dropping into the add-in over time. With DataCore boasting a longer track record in storage management than other developers working on DE replacements, I have to admit that I was expecting a more ambitious feature set from the company at launch – and the storage pool capacity limitations due to the use of standard RAID 0 and 1 (with mixed capacity drives) is an unwelcome surprise. From what we can see right now, storage management in Windows Home Server 2011 will lack the flexibility of competing technologies such as Synology’s HyrbidRAID, Drobo’s BeyondRAID or Netgear’s XRAID2. Ultimately, the price:features:quality ratio will ultimately determine which of the various storage management add-ins for Windows Home Server 2011 wins our, and your support in the coming months.
We’ll bring you more on DataCore’s solution for WHS in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out the full interview with DataCore over at the Home Server Show.
