Microsoft makes big gains in small-to-midsize NAS storage market

Robert L. Scheier   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Storage Stories  

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November 29, 2004 (Storage Networking World) -- Two years after formally entering the storage market, Microsoft Corp. has emerged as a major and even dominant provider of NAS management software for small-to-midsize business customers.
Microsoft still has a way to go before convincing some customers that Windows is secure and reliable enough to handle the most critical, high-volume applications. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue with the company's accomplishments two years after unveiling its Storage Division (which has since been combined with the company's server business).
NAS appliances based on Windows Storage Server 2003 and built by OEMs ranging from EMC Corp. to Dell Inc. now account for more than 50% of the NAS appliance market. Microsoft claims that hundreds of vendors support Microsoft-developed storage software. This includes Microsoft's iSCSI initiator service and driver, which encapsulates the SCSI data traffic found on SANs as IP packets for transmission over Ethernet LANs. It also includes its MPIO (Multipath I/O) technology for the clustering of storage devices to provide greater throughput and reliability.
Microsoft's key to success is bringing features once found only on high-end storage to lower-priced devices, while at the same time driving sales and increasing the value of its core Windows operating system.
Storage strategy
"Our goal is to increase the operational efficiency of the IT professional's infrastructure, resulting in saving our customers time and money," says Marcus Schmidt, senior product manager of Microsoft's Windows Server Division. "We do that by making Windows the best platform for storage."
First with Windows Server 2000, and then with Windows Server 2000 and Windows Storage Server 2003, Microsoft has made impressive strides in making Windows a "better SAN citizen." It eliminated, for example, Windows' nasty habit of writing to any volume it found when first attached to a SAN, which caused major data corruption problems. In Storage Server 2003, it went further by providing tools to help administrators track the configuration and performance of SANs.
Just as it did earlier in the application software space, Microsoft has provided application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) to independent software vendors (ISVs) that include commonly used storage functions such as clustering and snapshots. Using these APIs and SDKs, software vendors can create unique tools that are assured of working with other Windows-based software.

One of the best examples is Microsoft's creation of an iSCSI initiator. At its launch in June 2003, more than 85 software and hardware vendors had already committed to support it. In addition to its ratification by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the strong endorsement by Microsoft really put the stamp on the fact that "iSCSI's here, it's mature, and it's an industry standard," says Tom Major,

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