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BANGALORE: Software major Microsoft is keen on promoting not just its Windows Storage platform but is also working to create stand-alone storage solutions such as the data protection manager, which would pose competition to its storage partners like Veritas and EMC.
Microsoft’s storage strategy is clear: To bring high-end data storage functionality to the commodity server space. The second release of Windows Storage Server 2003 is due in December 2005.
To throw more light on the company’s storage strategy and roadmap, Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News spoke to Ben Fathi, general manager, storage and high availability, Microsoft and Seetharaman Harikrishnan, Director, Microsoft India (R&D) campus.
CyberMedia News: What kind of storage solutions do you offer to customers?
Fathi: In the Windows Server division, we multiple businesses that include the NAS business-what we call as the Windows Storage server 2003, the general purpose file server business, clustering and high availability server which is the enterprise edition of Windows server. We are also getting into branch office solutions which are not separate products but a series of scenarios/functionalities that we are adding to Windows server to make to more amenable to the deployment in branch environment.
Apart from this, we have also brought out the Data Protection Manager (DPM). This is not part of Windows but it is complementary product for data protection and disaster recovery. It works hand in hand with file servers.
File servers make up for approximately 18 per cent of the overall Windows Server installed base. We own around 54 per cent of the NAS market. It’s a little early to talk about DPM. We hope to get a huge chunk of the branch office segment with R2.
Can you elaborate on Microsoft’s Universal Distributed Storage (UDS) strategy?
Fathi: UDS is one of the five pillars of the Windows server system. Our UDS vision is to take high-end functionalities and features that have traditionally been part of proprietary systems like EMC and Network Appliance and bringing them to the commodity server space. This means you can buy hardware from any vendor and run standard Windows OS on it and have almost all the high availability and storage functionality like SAN management, snapshots and data protection built into the platform. All the storage features that are added on to the Windows are application aware. It works with a lot of third party applications like SQL, Exchange and Oracle to make sure data snapshots that we take are consistent. It also works with third party back up applications and SAN management applications. We make sure the Windows platform is storage friendly. Last year, we became the number one platform for external storage-both in terms of installed base and ongoing sales. All our servers talk to each other whether they are file protocols or application protocols and we try to make it as seamless as possible.
DPM is our first big storage product outside of Windows that we sell separately. To us, data protection and disaster recovery are two of the most important areas that all enterprises have to deal with.
Isn’t Microsoft moving towards becoming an active storage player and a competitor to most storage vendors who partner with you on the platform?
Fathi: Strictly speaking, Windows Storage server was our first storage product in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) area. In that space, we competed with companies like NetApp and EMC in the space.
Veritas and EMC are competitors for NAS in some areas. Their product is in the $ million range and while we are in the $50K range. At the same time, we work them on their products that complement Windows- back up, agents for DPM, snapshotting software.
Harikrishnan: When Bob Muglia formed the storage division at Microsoft three years ago, we had the vision of providing the best platform, solutions and ecosystem for partners. So in certain cases we are going to compete. DPM competes with Veritas and EMC. Our goal is to bring it to the mainstream since that is what we are good at. Customers also tell us that there is no other affordable, reliable and ease-of-use kind of back-up and recovery product. With the data growing 100% year on year, it has become a pain point. So the goal is we want to bring it to commodity hardware.
What features will you add in the upcoming R2 release?
Fathi: We have been making investments in storage for many years. We have had a distributed file system for the last five-six years, replication, snapshotting, SAN management and APIs. In December, we are releasing Windows 2003 R2 which will have functionalities around storage such as SAN management and file storage resource manager to keep track of how the disks are getting utilized. In the branch office area, we will have distributed file systems, caching, replication and management consoles. With this, network administrators can address issues, deploy patches, new software, files or back up centrally.
What is the role played by the Indian development center in the storage realm?
Harikrishnan: The second version of DPM was developed completely in India. This is a first for the IDC. The center is not about getting a cost advantage but about leveraging the Indian talent. We have 75 employees on the DPM team and its growing. We are also investing to make it a storage competency center.
Would you get into other storage areas such as Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and the Storage Area Network (SAN) space?
Fathi: I cannot comment right now about stand-alone storage products. But we are definitely focused on different kinds of data protection including ILM. In mid-2006, you will see the first wave of ILM products and solutions from Microsoft. We have to build APIs and services on the platform to enable that.
In the SAN space, we have a program called simple SAN. This is a simple and smaller sub-set of the functionalities geared to the group server and small sets of servers or multiple SANs. In R2, we have also built into Windows, a very simple user interface for doing end to end SAN management whether it is provisioning, growing a LAN or assigning an LAN to a server. Since it is built directly into Windows, one doesn’t have to go to any third party vendors for management. You will also see us commoditizing the whole SAN management space by putting it on the platform. You will see us in the future monetizing the higher-end versions of that if applicable and it is too early to talk about that.
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