Several factors have contributed to the growth of both online and offline organizational storage requirements. Among these factors are:
Increasing amounts of data
Increasing needs for high availability and fast recovery
Declining costs of storage
These developments have caused many organizations to place increased priority on storage planning and design. Planning and designing a storage solution involves defining the specific requirements of your organization and carefully evaluating how those requirements can work with or benefit from operating system services and features. Windows Server 2003 includes support for critical storage technologies such as direct-attached storage, network-attached storage, and SANs, as well as features such as Automated System Recovery (ASR), shadow copies, and open file backup that should be considered as you plan to meet your organization's storage requirements. If your storage plan includes using additional storage management or backup tools, you will also need to plan for integration of the operating system's storage features with these tools.
You can use the information in this chapter to assess your organization's specific storage needs, and consider the storage technologies and operating system features that are available to meet those needs. You can then follow the processes defined here to develop a storage plan that meets your needs for scalability, security, availability, and recoverability. While this chapter does discuss how to plan for and work with various storage architectures and technologies, you should already have a working knowledge of each of these technologies.
A properly implemented storage infrastructure will meet your organization's needs if it is sufficiently scalable, protects valuable data, is fault tolerant, and is recoverable in the event of disaster. With this in mind, you need to address both your organizational needs and specific methods for achieving these requirements when planning for storage. Figure 1.1 shows the steps involved in planning for storage.
Figure 1.1: Planning for Storage
Windows Server 2003 provides many new features that aid in the planning and deployment of storage within your organization. Table 1.1 describes these features.
|
Feature |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Automated System Recovery (ASR) |
ASR allows you to initiate bare metal restores of a system. With bare metal restores, you can boot a failed system by using the installation CD, insert an ASR floppy disk (created during an ASR backup), and recover the system state and required operating system files on the boot and system volumes from a backup. ASR can be combined with Remote Installation Services (RIS) to automate the recovery of several systems on your network. |
|
Volume Shadow Copy service |
The Volume Shadow Copy service provides an infrastructure for creating a volume that is a point-in-time image of the original volume. This image is known in the storage industry as a volume snapshot. The shadow copy can be used for the purpose of backing up the files within the volume; the copy is identical to the files at the instant the shadow copy was taken. Solutions built on the Volume Shadow Copy service can produce much higher quality snapshots than other technologies because of the ability to integrate with business applications and coordinate with storage hardware. As a result, high-fidelity backup recovery and data mining are possible without significantly affecting performance. |
|
Shadow copies |
You can give users access to previous versions of files by enabling shadow copies, which provide point-in-time copies of files stored on servers running Windows Server 2003. Because users can restore or roll back their files to a previous state, you can reduce the administrative burden of restoring previously backed up files for users who accidentally delete or overwrite them. |
|
Open file backup |
By integrating with the Volume Shadow Copy service, the Backup program (NTBackup.exe) available in Windows Server 2003 can now back up open files that are locked by a user or application. Previously, files had to be closed in order to be successfully backed up. |
|
Distributed File System (DFS) |
Servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition support multiple DFS roots on a single server. Other new DFS features include the ability to configure DFS to choose an alternate target based on cost if no same-site targets are available. |
|
File Replication service (FRS) |
You can use the Distributed File System snap-in to configure the FRS replication topologies (ring, hub and spoke, and custom), and configure connection priorities. FRS suppresses excessive replication and provides better staging directory management. |
|
SAN support |
Windows Server 2003 provides many new features that make it easier to work with data and devices on a SAN. These features include improved support for booting a system from a storage device on a SAN, greater control of mounting and unmounting volumes on the SAN, including the ability to suppress the automatic mounting of volumes, and improved handling of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for easy SAN integration and interoperability. |
|
Virtual Disk service (VDS) |
VDS provides a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to storage hardware and storage management programs that makes it easy for storage applications to work with storage hardware that includes a VDS provider. The new command-line tool DiskRaid (which is available in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit) allows you to manage hardware devices that have VDS hardware providers without the need for other management applications. |
|
Multipathing |
Multipathing provides for high availability data access by allowing a host to have up to 32 paths to access an external storage device, which facilitates failover and load balancing. Multipathing is not a feature of the operating system, but is supported through the MPIO Driver Development Kit (DDK), which provides a means for storage vendors to create interoperable multipathing solutions. |
|
Disk Defragmenter |
Disk Defragmenter performs faster and is more efficient than in the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, also now supports online defragmentation of the master file table (MFT), and can defragment NTFS volumes with any cluster size. |