One of the most interesting features for me that’s been announced in the next version of Windows Server so far is Storage Replication.

Microsoft’s definition in a blog post from last year is below, I’ve highlighted the parts that are I think could make this a disruptive new feature.

Storage Replica enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between clusters or servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.

The source article I read is available here.

I’m sure this feature will have restrictions and limitations, but I see this potentially as a way of:

• Providing multi-site high availability without Availability Groups or infrastructure-level storage replication
• Deploying failover clusters in cloud platforms (Azure etc)

Time will tell if any of these become possible……