Storage Spaces Direct
This chapter describes how CTE integrates with Windows Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) hyper-converged clusters. It contains the following sections:
S2D Overview
S2D uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create high-availability (HA) software-defined storage. SD2 is included in Windows Server 2019 Data center and Windows Server 2016 Data center, both of which are supported by CTE.
S2D extends the stack of usable storage devices to storage devices such as SATA and SAS HDD's, SSD's and NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) disks to create shared disk volumes. S2D supports clusters of a minimum of two nodes, and a maximum of 16 nodes and 400 drives. S2D aggregates the available storage into a Storage Pool.
The hyper-converged deployment option runs virtual machines on the servers providing the storage.
A complete description of the S2D product, and instructions on how to set up the S2D environment is available on the Microsoft website at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-direct-overview
Deployment Options
CTE supports S2D in a hyper-converged infrastructure where computing and storage components are in a single cluster as shown in the following figure.
Hyper-converged infrastructure
Hyper-converged with S2D and CTE virtual machines run on the servers providing the storage. In the following figure, CTE is installed inside 6 of the VMs to protect the data.
High-Level view of S2D
You can use all the capabilities of CTE to protect the data in the VMs in a S2D hyper-converged deployment. These capabilities are described in Supported Use Cases.
Supported Use Cases
Thales tested only Hyper-converged deployments in the following scenarios.
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Initial Data Transformation of data using:
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Live Data Transformation
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Offline Data Transformation
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Transparent Encryption/Decryption of structure and unstructured data
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Key rotation using a Live Data Transformation policy
