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Buoyed by support from key partners, Microsoft Monday announced it has released for general availability its feature pack for consolidating data from Exchange Server 2003 on network-attached storage (NAS)
Original equipment manufacturers EMC , Dell
, and HP
will be offering the feature pack on their NAS devices. The goal is to help customers boost return on investment by consolidating files and data stored on Exchange Server 2003.
Marcus Schmidt, senior project manager Windows Storage Server 2003 at Microsoft, reports the pack will be offered on EMC NetWin, Dell PowerVault,
and HP StorageWorks NAS devices.
The pledge of support could give Microsoft a greater inroad into the NAS software market, where it competes with the likes of Network Appliance at
the high end and Linux and open source vendors at the low end, Schmidt told internetnews.com.
“Plus, we have a really good set of independent software vendors (ISVs) coming out in support of this feature pack,” says Schmidt. “Those include Computer Associates, Legato, VERITAS Software, and Commvault.”
Windows Storage Server 2003, a complete file server with features such as Volume Shadow Copy Service for single snapshot views of storage, is a key
component of the Windows Server System for enabling XML-driven web services based on Microsoft’s .NET platform.
The feature pack was released to manufacturing at Storage Networking World Spring 2004 last month, and is geared to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), or departments of larger companies, pare storage costs without taking their systems down.
“The big win here is for customers that have been asking us for this for quite some time,” Schmidt says. “They want another option for their Exchange data
that isn’t just direct-attached storage or Fibre Channel SANs.”
For example, the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania is using the feature pack to manage volumes of e-mail. After Microsoft and HP offered the
pack to the school, the staff ran a hundred thousand e-mail messages through their Exchange Server and can now get them stored and retrieved off their
Storage Server in about 10 minutes. The school now has 1,000 Exchange mailboxes storing data on Windows Storage Server.
Going forward, Schmidt says he and his staff are working on providing storage management capabilities for Windows Storage Server 2003.
Story courtesy of Internet News.
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