Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > Guides > Dell ObjectScale and Integrated Systems for Data Analytics using Microsoft Azure HCI and SQL 2022 > Storage layer architecture
Each node is crucial and contributes to storage and compute capacity for HCI deployment. Storage Spaces Direct is a core technology of Azure Stack HCI that enables users to pool and consolidate all physical drives across nodes into a software-defined solution.
Storage Spaces Direct uses its Software Storage Bus to dynamically bind the fastest drives available in the pool to slower drives, enhancing the number of IO and throughput. Microsoft strongly recommends customers to use one pool per cluster. It is automatically created, and all eligible drives are added to it. All physical drives part of our cluster were configured into a single pool. To learn more about S2D, see Storage Spaces Direct overview.
Database files related to the SQL Server 2022 instance are stored in Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI volumes. We have used mirrored volumes for production SQL Server data and mirror accelerated parity volumes for VM OS data.
External Table objects are stored in ObjectScale Storage buckets. The PolyBase feature facilitates SQL Server the ability to access external tables and allow us to query the data with T-SQL queries.