Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is a software-defined storage solution that allows you to create a highly available and scalable storage system in Azure Stack HCI by pooling together local storage resources from multiple servers. It was introduced by Microsoft to provide a cost-effective and flexible way to build storage systems for virtualized and HCI environments. It is a core technology of Azure Stack HCI. You can scale out the storage capacity of the cluster by adding more servers or more drives, and S2D automatically onboards the new drives and rebalances the storage pool. Some additional features of SDS include:
- Fault tolerance—S2D provides fault tolerance by mirroring data across multiple drives or nodes within the cluster. This helps ensure data availability in the event of a hardware failure.
- Resiliency—S2D uses techniques like erasure coding and mirroring to protect data against drive and server failures. It also automatically rebuilds data once a drive is replaced.
- Management—You can manage S2D using Windows Admin Center, PowerShell, or System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
- Performance—S2D delivers fast, consistent, and low latency performance for even the most demanding of workloads.