Microsoft ramps up storage offerings
Microsoft ramps up storage offerings
Microsoft has signalled its intention to get more deeply involved in the storage market by announcing a number of upgrades to its storage offerings.
The company plans to introduce a new "feature pack" for its Windows Storage Server 2003, which will allow it to store data from Microsoft's messaging software. It has also announced new developments designed to simplify the management of storage area networks (SANs) within the Windows Server 2003 environment.
"Customers tell us they are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their IT infrastructure through networked storage on the Windows platform," said Zane Adam, director of product management and marketing for storage at Microsoft. "These announcements reflect how we are meeting customers' need to reduce storage costs with consolidated, simplified management of Exchange Server data on Windows Storage Server and how we are helping make SANs more manageable and cost-effective for organizations of all sizes."
In addition, Microsoft has developed a Fibre Channel Information Tool for Windows Server 2003, which gathers component SAN information so that users have critical configuration data at hand in order to enable them to troubleshoot multivendor environments.
Microsoft is also increasing its support of iSCSI, with its iSCSI architecture now supported by Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition.
Finally, the company announced support for what it calls storage tracing, a term which relates to the identification of communication between storage devices and servers. This can be used to debug SANs without having to take them offline. The feature will be available for Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003, which will be released in the latter part of this year.
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