Storage Spaces Direct

Our system performs background integrity checks in real time so that the file system can offer maximum reliability. We also ensure you have the highest availability, by expertly handling the multiple layers of redundancy. On top of this, Barton’s synchronous storage replication between data centers gives you a rock-solid disaster recovery system, which means you’re prepared for every possible scenario.

We make the most of highly innovative features such as ReFS, Storage Spaces and SMB Direct to deliver data resilience, tiering and multipath storage. Barton’s software orchestrates these Windows Server technologies to guarantee you have optimum levels of data integrity, resilience and multipath connectivity over Ethernet. The storage nodes operate as a cluster and your data remain intact, all without the need for dedicated hot spare disks. Thanks to the location awareness feature, your data are even available during maintenance or an incident on the disk, node, cluster or site level.

Barton’s software-defined storage automatically optimizes performance by storing data on the most suitable storage media, whether it’s cache, NVMe, SSD or standard spinning hard disks. The way that data is assigned to tiers is based on usage (hot/cold) and on the required availability (mirror/parity), without the system administrator having to intervene at all. The results are impressive, with storage performance boosted to levels on a par with all-flash storage. You can use any combination of these storage media to satisfy your storage specifications. Remarkably, you can tune your storage system at the click of a button to opt for continuously available or highly available storage, depending on the requirements of the data stored on a given share.

We give you all the basic building blocks – extra clusters, nodes and disk pools – to create your ideal storage system. To make your life even simpler, Barton automatically takes care of adding the new resources to the system. The intelligent software reduces storage management to the most basic task, just providing space to store data, while the disaggregated system provides all the flexibility required to scale-out compute power and storage as needed.

In many organizations, Windows Server is the bridge between on-premises storage and the Azure public cloud service. The latest version, Windows Server 2016, continues this tradition. This means it’s simple to bolt on Azure services such as Backup, Site Recovery and Azure witness’s feature for failover clusters to the Barton on-premises storage. All this gives you even more flexibility. The benefits don’t end there as you’ll soon discover that Azure offers plenty of other nifty services, many of which can transparently operate either on-premises or in the cloud.

The Barton system runs on tier-1 server hardware to guarantee you have the highest possible availability and premium support. We act as the single point of contact for both your business-critical hardware and software. Our engineers are fully trained and have all earned a Storage Spaces Direct qualification from Microsoft and server hardware certification from Dell, HPE and Lenovo, so you can be confident that your storage is in expert hands.

Barton’s high-availability services rely on Windows Server 2016 clustering, which supports rolling updates automated by Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), to give you continuous data availability. MSCS will automatically quarantine a node by making it I/O silent, rather than allowing it to go offline. This gives more control over the cluster and helps ensure consistent availability of your data.

To help us provide the best possible software-defined storage we use Windows Health Service, an essential instrument for closely monitoring Barton’s storage readiness. Health Service takes care of simple monitoring, self-operation and safe maintenance. By helping to identify potential problems, Health Service allows Barton Glass to recommend clear remedial actions, monitor those actions and give expert feedback and detailed metrics. Health Service also automates actions such as replacing a faulty disk, which guarantees you have continuous data resilience. The replacement disk is added to the storage pool and data resilience is restored to the new disk, all without any user intervention.

So how come Barton can build highly available and scalable software-defined storage solutions at a fraction of the cost of a SAN or NAS? Good question. The answer is simple: Barton uses industry-standard servers with local, affordable storage technology. Of course, you still get all the features of traditional storage systems: deduplication, replication, multipath, tiering, mirror and parity data resilience, clusters and the whole nine yards. They come as part of the standard package, so you don’t need to buy additional licenses. And you get to combine different storage media (NVMe, flash, HDD) at the storage device level to support the different workloads, all without the headache of having to manage storage tiering.