Windows File and Storage Directions

Highly scalable and cost effective storage is a reality when it comes to cloud infrastructure such as map reduce, indexing and other forms of blob storage. The same can’t be said about the more traditional applications that continue to rely on the traditional file semantics and APIs. Windows 8 storage investments allow us to move in the direction of scalable cost-effective storage for the applications that continue to rely on file semantics and APIs. Some of these have been previously talked about at SDC, including “Storage Spaces” and ReFS. A key innovation here is the notion of resiliency to various kinds of failures. This flips the default assumption from “the hardware under me will give me reliable storage” to “the hardware under me will make best effort but I have to expect failures and errors”. Another key assumption is that availability is key to scalability. When you’re dealing with errors on a PB volume, it’s far better to make parts of it available sooner than to make everything unavailable in the hope that everything will be available much later (it usually isn’t later as well). There is usually another form of data redundancy present that allows apps writers and administrators to recover the lost parts, and the sooner we can allow them to do the better it is. The goal of this talk is to provide the broad context around these and other innovations in the Windows storage stack.

Learning Objectives

Understand the storage and file system innovations in Windows 8
Understand how these innovations are foundational for further changes in Windows