ReFS

New MS FS

http://www.winrumors.com/microsofts-new-windows-8-resilient-file-system-refs-will-be-server-only/

Don't know what it can do yet, but, it is supposed to be Resilient.

and ZFS is resilient.

Monolithic ?

3 hours ago, felix9 wrote

and ZFS is resilient.

Monolithic ?

To protect against disk and memory errors in servers we have RAID and ECC respectively - why is ReFS necessary? If you're in a situation where your disks are failing faster than the array can be rebuilt and you're also getting unrecoverable memory errors, then no special filesystem is going to save you.

(If I understand ReFS correctly) It could be argued ReFS is a substitute for RAID in low-end servers, but low-end servers typically run Linux because WS licenses start at $500 which often more than entry-level hardware costs to begin with - so what problem does this solve and who benefits then?

I think this filesystem is the replacement of what Windows Home Server originally had.

@ZippyV: It certainly has similar goals: easy deduplication, multiple volumes extendable from one large pool of disk space, improved failure tolerance, easy expansion by simply adding more disks. It's just a shame they pretty much killed all interest in WHS before they got this working really.

Is this a real FS, or just something sitting on top of NTFS?

@spivonious:

Real FS because you need to reformat it.

I think you guys are talking about Storage Spaces, not ReFS (though SS probably uses ReFS underneath the covers)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/11/23/windows-8-platform-storage-part-1.aspx

5 days ago, W3bbo wrote

*snip*

To protect against disk and memory errors in servers we have RAID and ECC respectively - why is ReFS necessary? If you're in a situation where your disks are failing faster than the array can be rebuilt and you're also getting unrecoverable memory errors, then no special filesystem is going to save you.

(If I understand ReFS correctly) It could be argued ReFS is a substitute for RAID in low-end servers, but low-end servers typically run Linux because WS licenses start at $500 which often more than entry-level hardware costs to begin with - so what problem does this solve and who benefits then?

I am also a little confused about this one. On servers, I would expect people to use some form of RAID for redundancy, not SS, therefore I assume this technology to be more for home users and small offices. However, it seems that it will need ReFS to run SS and I read that ReFS will only be available on servers. I guess we are speculating on rumors about a product that is not yet in beta, but I am impationent to find out more about it. 

46 minutes ago, giovanni wrote

*snip*

I am also a little confused about this one. On servers, I would expect people to use some form of RAID for redundancy, not SS, therefore I assume this technology to be more for home users and small offices. However, it seems that it will need ReFS to run SS and I read that ReFS will only be available on servers. I guess we are speculating on rumors about a product that is not yet in beta, but I am impationent to find out more about it. 

SS is pretty much a complete replacement for the really, really expensive software that typically front-ends SAN installations. Being able to do this directly within Windows in a generic and fairly standard way could prove immensely useful in all manner of situations. It also pitches Windows fileservers as a genuine replacement for SAN front-end filers like NetApp, especially given that you get de-dupe for free.

9 minutes ago, AndyC wrote

*snip*

SS is pretty much a complete replacement for the really, really expensive software that typically front-ends SAN installations. Being able to do this directly within Windows in a generic and fairly standard way could prove immensely useful in all manner of situations. It also pitches Windows fileservers as a genuine replacement for SAN front-end filers like NetApp, especially given that you get de-dupe for free.

I've not really been following SS, but do you know if the de-dup works on files inside VHDs?

@AndyC: Does SS work on a network too? I thought it worked only on internal drives.

2 hours ago, PerfectPhase wrote

*snip*

I've not really been following SS, but do you know if the de-dup works on files inside VHDs?

Not sure, still haven't seen a really detailed explanation of things. Looking forward to the day Charles gets round to doing some Going Deeps on all this stuff.

1 hour ago, giovanni wrote

@AndyC: Does SS work on a network too? I thought it worked only on internal drives.

SAN disks are usually mounted with something like fibre channel or iSCSI and appear like local disks to the host server. I don't think you would be able to do it with a NAS style volume, if that's what you mean.

@AndyC: Yes, thanks. I have always been confused about SAN vs. NAS...

Update, here is a more detailed explaination.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx