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The perils of alignment for memory access and disk I/O
In my earlier blog, I described how Visual Studio (VS) 2012 is now a requirement for writing kernel mode drivers on both the x86/x64 Intel/AMD, and also the ARM version of Windows 8. So I installed VS...
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Windows Write caching – Part 1 Overview
Certain Windows applications such as database applications need to ensure their I/O is committed to media, even at the cost of reduced throughput. However, at times an administrator has faith in the...
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Windows Write Caching – Part 2 An overview for Application Developers
Part1 of this blog presented an overview of the Windows storage stack. Application programmers may use a number of interfaces to control the way their application data is cached or if they prefer, not...
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Windows Write Caching – Part 3 – An Overview For System Administrators
The Windows Cache Manager (also referred to as System Cache) acts as a single system-wide cache that contains driver code, application code, data for both, user mode applications as well as driver...
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Hyper-V 2012 operations and the importance of SMB 3.0 Multichannel
Jose Baretto from Microsoft has put out numerous blogs and talks, including some on SMB 3.0 and Multichannel. Some examples include The basics of SMB 3.0 Multichannel and Windows Server 2012 NIC...
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Tiered Storage and write back caching in Windows Server 2012 R2
With Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft introduces support for tiered storage and write back caching. With only rudimentary details available, this blog examines some highlights and also asks a few...
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The need for Change Block Tracking to perform Differential backups of Hyper-V...
Hyper-V has been gaining momentum and with Hyper-V 2012 supporting SMB 3.0 based NAS storage, this momentum is likely to accelerate. And of course, any commercial deployment needs to have a proper...
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Backup performance and SMB 3 Multi Channel
In this day and age of exploding data amounts, backup and restore is both increasingly important, and becoming more common and taken for granted. But not all backup “target systems” i.e. the systems to...
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Protocol Converter between CIFS, SMB2, SMB3, and NFS
As a Microsoft Storage MVP, I am always looking for ways to fill in the gaps between what Windows natively offers, and what seems to be useful for enterprise and consumer scenarios. One intriguing...
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SMB 3 NAS is preferable to DAS in a Windows environment
Microsoft is investing heavily in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) protocol SMB 3 and is clearly laying out a road map that suggests NAS is the future as opposed to Direct Attached Storage (DAS)....
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