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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


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