Question

XYZ Manufacturing creates made-to-order products and sells them to distributors in North America. The company’s headquarters are in a large building in downtown Chicago. The senior management—the president and all vice presidents—use Macintosh computers with macOS. The Marketing department uses Windows 10, as does the Accounting department. The Manufacturing and Operations department uses workstations running Linux to operate a complex inventory and distribution client/server system. The servers used by the company include a combination of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016. There has been some turnover in the company’s Computer Support area, so you have been hired as a consultant to provide help.

A new database application that requires high availability will use Storage Spaces on one of the Windows Server 2016 systems. You want a file system that can recover from file corruption and is scalable to support very large files and volumes. The files used in the application don't require features like encryption or quotas because speed and reliability are paramount. The application and its data will be located on volumes separate from the Windows OS. What file system would be a good fit for this application and

Answer 1

use a resilient file system to maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity by means of resiliency to corruption. It seeks to address an expanding set of storage scenarios and establish a foundation for future innovations.

ReFS has features that can precisely detect corruptions and also fix those corruptions while remaining online, helping provide increased integrity and availability for your data:

• Integrity-streams - ReFS uses checksums for metadata and optionally for file data, giving ReFS the ability to reliably detect corruptions.
• Storage Spaces integration - When used in conjunction with a mirror or parity space, ReFS can automatically repair detected corruptions using the alternate copy of the data provided by Storage Spaces. Repair processes are both localized to the area of corruption and performed online, requiring no volume downtime.
• Salvaging data - If a volume becomes corrupted and an alternate copy of the corrupted data doesn't exist, ReFS removes the corrupt data from the namespace. ReFS keeps the volume online while it handles most non-correctable corruptions, but there are rare cases that require ReFS to take the volume offline.
• Proactive error correction - In addition to validating data before reads and writes, ReFS introduces a data integrity scanner, known as a scrubber. This scrubber periodically scans the volume, identifying latent corruptions and proactively triggering a repair of corrupt data.