Microsoft Eyes Storage MarketMicrosoft Eyes Storage Market

Microsoft already has made it easier to support and integrate third-party products just by entering the network-attached storage market, Padovani says. "Before Microsoft got into NAS, we had to license Network Appliance or Snap [a direct competitor to Windows-based NAS products] devices, and it was hard to work with any third-party software," he says.

Developers of storage-management software may have the most to fear from Microsoft's storage push. But two of them don't seem worried. Computer Associates' BrightStor storage system already uses a version of Volume Shadow Copy Services to back up and restore data for SQL Server, says Nigel Turner, senior VP of BrightStor Storage. The API has helped boost performance so 2.6 terabytes data can be backed up in an hour and 2.2 terabytes of data can be recovered per hour. "We have to gain low-level integration for such things," he says, "and Microsoft is making it easier than ever to do that now."

Veritas Software Corp., another leading storage-management vendor, expects to have Volume Shadow Copy Services integrated into its NetBackup 4.5 application within four months, says Eric Burgener, senior director of the Microsoft alliance at Veritas. He says the challenge is to keep adding value to anything Microsoft adds to the operating system.

Microsoft's challenge is to match the storage, backup, and recovery features available on Unix systems, and it's a long way from accomplishing that, Burgener says. Unix-based storage management systems do a better job of mirroring data while changes and transactions are taking place, he says. They also can handle wide-area clustering of up to 32 servers. Microsoft's forthcoming Cluster Server will only handle eight servers. Plus, "Microsoft will only build those capabilities for Windows, while we support multiple operating systems," Burgener says.

Still, most competitors and analysts expect Microsoft to continue to make inroads in storage. Analyst Marrone says the next steps will see Microsoft adding replication, archiving, and file distribution. "It'll probably be 2004 if they do it themselves," she says, "or they could do it [faster] with partners."

Even managers skeptical about Microsoft's storage efforts want some of those capabilities. "I'd like Microsoft to get into SQL Server replication so I wouldn't need a third-party vendor to do it," Myar says. "I want it to be part of SQL Server, but I want it to work this time."

Illustration by J.D. King