Microsoft NAS Windows opened by OEMs
Microsoft has gained support from its OEM partners to make its Windows Storage Server 2003 available with NAS devices to help customers to consolidate files and data stored on Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003.
EMC, Dell and HP will offer Microsoft's feature pack for consolidating data from Exchange Server 2003. It will be offered with EMC NetWin, Dell PowerVault and HP StorageWorks NAS devices.
The idea is that the NAS server will run a copy of Windows Server 2003, but the software will be optimised for the purpose of acting as a file server. This means that a lot of unnecessary services will be eliminated and other services will be reprioritised.
It will offer huge quantities of disk space, allowing administrators to consolidate multiple general purpose file servers into a single NAS server.
This reduces the cost to organisations because it reduces the administrative burden and reduces software licencing costs.
Windows Storage Server 2003 can also be integrated with SAN environments too and multiple Windows Storage Servers can be used on the network as a way of providing additional storage and redundancy.
It has features such as a Volume Shadow Copy Service for single snapshot views of storage. This is a key component of the Windows Server System for enabling XML-drive web services based on Microsoft's .NET platform.
Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the enterprise storage division at Microsoft said. "IT professionals continue to tell us they need cost-effective storage solutions to help ensure data availability, to realise the savings of file server consolidation and to maintain business continuity. With features like Volume Shadow Copy Services, Virtual Disk Services, and fail over clustering, Windows Storage Server 2003 meets those critical storage needs, all at a low cost."
An example of the success of this system was experienced recently in a Pennsylvanian school. HP and Microsoft offered the school this pack and the staff entered one hundred thousand email messages through the Exchange Server. They were able to retrieve these message from the storage server in about 10 minutes.
The school now has 1,000 Exchange mailboxes which can store data on the Windows Storage Server.
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