Not only can Hyper-V be more easily leveraged in small businesses now, but Windows Server 2012 also introduces additional storage flexibility, allowing the use of cheaper storage in more ways, and adding new features to your existing storage solutions.
SMB 3
The server message block (SMB) protocol is ancient in technology terms. However it’s a ubiquitous protocol that serves an important purpose, and it does it well (like FTP). But new features continue to be added, making it a more powerful protocol than ever before. Let’s highlight how it can help serve your small business.
SMB Directory Leasing introduces a longer living directory cache. This means fewer round-trips from the user’s device to the server because metadata is maintained in the directory cache for a longer period of time. You can look forward to shorter application response times here, especially if you’re in a branch office.
SMB Encryption introduces end-to-end encryption, providing greater protection for SMB data being transferred over unsecured networks, like your ISP’s. No additional cost for encryption appliances or WAN optimization devices required.
SMB Scale Out is good for the growing small business. It lets you create file shares that provide direct, simultaneous access to data across your entire file server cluster. This reduces bandwidth, load balances across the nodes in the file server cluster, and increases bandwidth as additional cluster nodes are added.
Storage Spaces
The idea behind Storage Spaces isn’t new, but it’s a new feature for Windows Server 2012, and it’s built-in. It’s what you would call storage virtualization, and essentially it allows you to create a storage pool out of the local HDDs ins, or connected to, your servers. And this storage pool grows or shrinks as you add/remote disks from the pool, so it’s like a storage cloud in the sense that it’s elastic.
That’s all of the information I want to share today about improvements to storage in Windows Server 2012. There’s three parts left to the series, so please keep checking back to find out other ways Windows Server 2012 can benefit your small business.