Storage Replica (SR)

SR is a new way to synchronize data between servers. It is a data-replication technology that provides the ability for block-level data replication between servers, even across different physical sites. SR is a type of redundancy that we hadn't seen in a Microsoft platform prior to Windows Server 2016; in the past, we had to rely on third-party tools for this kind of capability. SR is also important to discuss on the heels of failover clustering because SR is the secret sauce that enables multi-site failover clustering to happen. When you want to host cluster nodes in multiple physical locations, you need a way to make sure that the data used by those cluster nodes is synced continuously, so that a failover is actually possible. This data flow is provided by SR.

One of the neat data points about SR is that it finally allows a single-vendor solution, that vendor being Microsoft of course, to provide the end-to-end technology and software for storage and...