Microsoft's Bright Storage Future
What do applications like Word, Excel, Exchange and especially SQL Server produce?
Data. And what does one do with data? Why, store it, of course.
And what does storage produce? Money!
The storage software market includes backup, replication, mirroring, high availability,
hierarchical storage (also know as ILM), archiving, storage virtualization,
SANs, NAS and, oh yeah, restore. I'm sure there are a couple dozen categories
I forgot.
Microsoft, I'd guess, has the categories all memorized, including the average
annual revenue and trailing five-year growth for each area.
Redmond is slowly getting into the storage market. As owner of the OS and some
of the bigger data-producing apps, this makes a lot of sense.
Leading the charge is the Microsoft
Universal Distributed Storage plan, an attempt to bring Windows-centric
standards to the storage market. And if you've ever tried to get fibre channel
arrays from EMC to work with Network Appliance NAS boxes and talk to an Intel
iSCSI box, you'll welcome any move toward standards. And if you end up shelling
out a few dollars for Windows Storage Server of Microsoft System Center Data
Protection Manager, so be it.
Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 2006