Microsoft, founded in 1975, released its first Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution, Storage Spaces, as a feature in Windows Server 2012. Storage Spaces was enhanced in the R2 release of Windows Server 2012. In october 2016 Microsoft introduced the all-new Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) as integral part of the Windows Server 2016 platform. Microsoft S2D aggregates direct attached storage from separate x86 servers into a highly available shared storage pool.

At the start of October 2019 Microsoft introduced a new S2D version with the release of Windows Server 2019. The new S2D version features both new capabilities as well as improvements in existing capabilities.

Customer install base and number of employees working on S2D are unknown at this time. In March 2018 there were more than 10,000 clusters worldwide running Storage Spaces Direct.