Windows Server 2012 Storage Space is an abstraction to present specified storage capacity of a group of physical disks as if the capacity is from one logical entity called a storage pool. The process is to group selected physical disks into a container, the so-called storage pool, such that the total capacity collectively presented by those associated physical disks can appear and become manageable as a single and seemingly continuous space. Subsequently a storage administrator creates a virtual disk based on a storage pool, configure a storage layout which is essentially a RAID level, and expose the storage of the virtual disk as a drive letter or a mapped folder in Windows Explorer.

With multiple disks presented collectively as one logical entity, i.e., a storage pool, Windows Server 2012 can act as a RAID controller for configuring a virtual disk based on the storage pool as software RAID. However the scalability, resiliency, and optimization that the Storage Space subsystem delivers are much more than just what a software RAID offers. Therefore Windows Server 2012 presents Storage Space subsystem as a set of natively supported storage virtualization and optimization capabilities and not just software RIAD, per se. The concepts and operations are detailed at http://aka.ms/StorageSpace.

• Getting Productive with Windows Server 2012 (Part 1)
• A Private Cloud Delivers IT as a Service
• Infrastructure Was Then, Private Cloud Is Now and Beyond
• Seven Must-Know Features of Windows Server 2012

• Yung Chou's blog
• Virtualization vs. Private Cloud