“ReFS”, this term was absolutely new to me when I was reading this white paper from Microsoft ‘Storage Windows Server 2012′.
ReFS is the next gen file system from Microsoft, and available in Windows Server 2012.
Here are some of the key ReFS benefits and capabilities -
1. Robust disk updating - This avoids problems associated with power failures during disk updates.
2. Data Integrity - This ensures detection of all forms of disk corruption and it uses checksum.
3. Availability - Ensures that the whole volume will never go down when there is a corruption.
4. Scalability - ReFS is highly scalable and its a great benefit considering the fact that data demands are getting high and high.
5. Proactive error identification - Scans the volume for errors.
For the complete list and detailed explanation refer the below mentioned white papers and blog posts -
Optimized Storage Efficiency with Windows Server 2012
Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS
Being a SQLServer professional my next focus was to understand how ReFS is going to benefit my SQLServer configurations, and to my surprise there was no real good news !
Denny Cherry(B/T) has a great blog post on why SQLServer will have issues if we run on ReFS. I would encourage you to read that post now.
This is mainly because some of the NTFS features such as named streams and sparse files are not supported in ReFS. SQL Server uses these features for DBCC CHECKDB and Snapshots.
Without using named streams DBCC CHECKDB will lock objects and this is not a desirable situation from everyone’s perspective.
I personally would like to test these situations and see what all scenarios comes up.I’m setting up an environment for this very purpose and looking forward to come with more details.
Conclusion -
If you are deciding to leverage ReFS for SQLServer deployments, then you would need to think twice and hold on to the decision.
