We are moving ever closer to the release of Drive Bender ER1. That said, we are getting a lot of questions around this ER1 release, and what this means for the full featured Drive Bender v2 release.
Well for those that may not already know, ER1 stands for “Early Release 1”, and is basically a production release of the new v2 code, but with some of the features yet to be added. At the start of 2014 we looked at our timelines for the Drive Bender v2 release, and the number of fixes and updates made to the v2 code over and above v1… in view of this, it was decided that we should feature lock the v2 code, test and refine what was in place to the point that we could release a v2 version that would replace the current v1 release.
Why… why not wait until all features are in place? Well there are two main reasons, 1) The feedback on the new interface has been incredibly strong, and we wanted to get this out to our users ASAP, and 2) The new code base offers much more in the way of speed and reliability over v1, not to mention a the few niggling v1 bugs had been quashed!
So whats next? We are in the final stages of ER1 testing and bug fixing, and we now have a great platform to bolt on the balance of the v2 features. Here’s a list on the new features coming in ER1.
Drive Bender v2 ER1 (release soon)
New user interface
Drive Bender v2 brings with it an entirely new interface, this is to improve usability and overall interface performance. With this we are also improving the notification engine and introducing client notification popups.
The new Server 2012 R2 server addin interface
The new Windows interface
Under the hood
Under the hood Drive Bender v2 is a vastly different beast, we have re-architect most of the core application, the result is a much faster, robust and scalable platform. Features such as NFS support, pool GPT partitioning and better handling of drive disconnection are just some of the new features of this new code.
File system health monitor improvements
The performance of the file system health monitor has been improved, along with improved duplication issue detection (such as repeated failure of duplication creation etc) and general drive health.
Network drive support
This new feature is straight forward, you can now add a network path to the pool, and it is treated just like a physical hard drive.
Landing zone support
This is the ability to set a specific drive to be used for all writes to the pool, then at a later time, these files are to be moved from the landing zone drive to the rest of the drives in the pool. The idea here is that a fast drive can be set as the landing zone to improve overall write speeds to the pool.
Changes to file balancing (more to come)
We have improved the “even balancing” method and have add limited “cascade balancing” support (if you disable balancing, Drive Bender now reverts to cascade balancing).
Post ER1 release
Obviously the are a number of major v2 features still to come (you can see a list of v2 features here), and we’ll be working on these as fast as our little fingers will carry us. We are hoping to delivery a number of these in the first post ER1 beta. Finally I can hear you asking “what is happening with VSS support”? Well this is proving to be quite the challenge to say the least. The VSS framework put in place by MS is, well, to be kind, poorly documented and mostly held together with gaffer tape… however our intention is to deliver this after v2 ships providing we can get it to work reliably.
Finally I’d like to make a shout out to the users that have helped with beta testing, your feedback has been invaluable, thanks!