It’s been 18 months since we announced general availability of Windows Server 2016, the first release to include Storage Spaces Direct, software-defined storage for the modern hyper-converged datacenter. Today, we’re pleased to share an update on Storage Spaces Direct adoption.
We’ve reached an exciting milestone: there are now over 10,000 clusters worldwide running Storage Spaces Direct! Organizations of all sizes, from small businesses deploying just two nodes, to large enterprises and governments deploying hundreds of nodes, depend on Windows Server and Storage Spaces Direct for their critical applications and infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is the fastest-growing segment of the on-premises server industry. By consolidating software-defined compute, storage, and networking into one cluster, customers benefit from the latest x86 hardware innovation and achieve cost-effective, high-performance, and easily-scalable virtualization.
We’re deeply humbled by the trust our customers place in Windows Server, and we’re committed to continuing to deliver new features and improve existing ones based on your feedback. Later this year, Windows Server 2019 will add deduplication and compression, support for persistent memory, improved reliability and scalability, an entirely new management experience, and much more for Storage Spaces Direct.
Looking to get started? We recommend these Windows Server Software-Defined offers from our partners. They are designed, assembled, and validated against our reference architecture to ensure compatibility and reliability, so you get up and running quickly.
To our customers and our partners, thank you.
Here’s to the next 10,000!
Note on methodology: the figure cited is the number of currently active clusters reporting anonymized census-level telemetry, excluding internal Microsoft deployments and those that are obviously not production, such as clusters that exist for less than 7 days (e.g. demo environments) or single-node Azure Stack Development Kits. Clusters which cannot or do not report telemetry are also not included.