Micron Accelerated Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

Overview

Get the performance, density, flexibility and scale from your storage infrastructure that is essential for operational and business success with Micron Accelerated Solutions for Microsoft®’s new portfolio for Azure Stack HCI solutions. Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged solution that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on-premises specifically on Windows Server 2019 clusters.

Our long-time integration includes accelerated storage solutions for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Hyper-V®, the Microsoft hypervisor for virtualized computing. Both of these solutions are embedded as technologies within Azure Stack HCI. Storage Spaces Direct is a software-defined storage (SDS) solution for converged and hyperconverged data centers, providing both traditional storage area network services and virtualized infrastructure solutions. It was introduced with Microsoft Windows 2016 Service Pack 2, while Storage Spaces, its earlier incarnation, was introduced with Windows Server 2012.

How It’s Built

Our Accelerated Solutions for Microsoft Storage Spaces DirectAzure Stack HCI and previous generations are built upon industry standard x86 server architectures along with Microsoft’s Windows Server ® platforms (2019 and after for Azure Stack HCI) and are powered by fast Micron NVMe™ and SATA enterprise SSDs and Micron DRAM memory. These solutions are delivered to you as a series of reference architectures that provide blueprints for creating four-node Storage Spaces Direct clusters that can be expanded as needed to meet your application requirements. For example, here’s our accelerated solution for the Microsoft Windows 2016 Service Pack 2 version of Storage Spaces Direct.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Why Microsoft Azure Stack HCI?

For customers committed to Microsoft infrastructure services, Azure Stack HCI is an obvious choice for hyperconverged infrastructure needs. For customers with complex IT environments, Microsoft’s intention is to provide solutions that meet them where they are with the right technology for the right business need. By bringing it into the Azure Stack family Microsoft has started to offer new options to connect seamlessly with Azure for infrastructure management services.

Key Benefits

  • Simplicity – Microsoft makes use of commonly available x86 standard servers from multiple vendors at a variety of price points. Each reference architecture provides information that enables you to rapidly deploy the specified solution infrastructure, along with performance analysis to ensure you properly size the deployment.
  • Performance – Each reference architecture leverages Micron’s advanced, high-performance SSDs and DRAM, enabling high performance that is optimized for Azure Stack HCI or Storage Spaces Direct.
  • Fault Tolerance – The scalable software-defined storage SDS solution provides data redundancy by ensuring copies of all data are duplicated on more than one node within the cluster. When a component or an entire server fails, Storage Spaces Direct the platform can continue to provide data services to hosted applications until the failing component is repaired.
  • Scalability – Each reference architecture documents a basic, fault-tolerant four-node Azure Stack HCI or Storage Spaces Direct solution that can scale up to 16 nodes per Storage Spaces Direct cluster, making it capable of generating millions of IOPS to fit almost any application requirement.
  • Flexibility – These Microsoft solutions can be deployed as a disaggregated (storage area network), converged or hyperconverged configuration, providing support for a wide variety of application and workload needs. We provide reference architectures that document hyperconverged and converged solutions that can be built using your server vendor of choice with a wide variety of Micron SSDs based on performance and endurance needs.

Resources

Microsoft 
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