Advantages of Storage Spaces over a hardware RAID solution

[ThatBoringBloke]

Ok, so I'm currently looking at upgrade plans to server 2016 and I'm playing with storage spaces. Could someone please explain (in simple terms) why I would want to implement Storage Spaces over a traditional volume solution?

 

Is the advantage only there if you implement tiered storage?

Would you still utilise a hardware RAID solution?

I know you can dynamically expand storage, but you could do that anyway with traditional volumes.

[ThatBoringBloke]

*BUMP*

 

I'm still leaning towards a traditional Hardware RAID and volumes solution unless someone can suggest otherwise.

[Michael]

Storage Spaces is essentially distributed software RAID, with copies held on multiple servers. It's an alternative to software or hardware RAID, I wouldn't say it's a replacement.

[snagrat]

Storage Spaces Direct is only for HyperV and SQL workloads currently.

 

It is not meant as a direct replacement for hardware RAID

[Norphy]

Having got quotes from Stone for their Equinox system, it's a tad cheaper than a tradition three host plus SAN solution so I guess that's one advantage.

 

There's less hardware and no SAN to manage. All data is replicated over all nodes so in theory, I can see this being more resilient and possibly a bit faster as well as the hosts are accessing their data from local storage so aren't having to retrieve it from one place over a contended storage network.

 

Setting it up looks to be more complicated and I think the only way to get it supported is to get the entire solution from an OEM