Advertisment

"Microsoft will get into ILM space in 2006"

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

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.

Advertisment

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?

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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.

tech-news