Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Storage Performance and Cost Analysis

Organizations of all sizes are constantly looking for ways do more with less. With IT spending budgets limited and data growing at rapid rates, it’s important for organizations to address the cost and management burdens introduced in complex storage environments. Microsoft looks to alleviate these concerns and more with its new Windows Server 2012 file server cluster with Storage Spaces over the SMB 3.0 protocol.

ESG Lab tested the performance readiness and cost-effectiveness of Microsoft’s new storage solution and compared the results with two common storage solutions: an ISCSI and FC SAN. For performance testing, ESG Lab tested a tier-1 virtualized Microsoft SQL Server 2012 application workload and witnessed a negligible performance difference between all the tested storage configurations. In fact, when testing with as close to the exact same storage configuration as possible across each of the tested configurations, ESG Lab witnessed a slight performance benefit with Microsoft’s storage solution over iSCSI and FC SAN solutions.

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