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.