Microsoft Ramps Up Storage Profile

DALLAS—Microsoft is on course to improve its share of the storage market that has long been dominated by EMC, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and others, said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsofts Data and Storage Platform Division, speaking Oct. 17 at Storage Networking World here.

Microsoft has already proved itself as the "general platform for all data"—through widespread adoption of Windows, Microsoft Office and Exchange—and is carrying this experience forward into the storage market, he said.

"Were making storage products that you can bet your business on," Kummert said, "with support for standards, a direction toward self-maintenance and the support of our wide range of partners."

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Microsoft used the conference to announce that it is releasing to its manufacturing division several new features for its Data Protection Manager 2.0, including improved data recovery and snapshot capabilities and upgraded support for other Microsoft applications.

Data Protection Manager, which had supported only file/print services in the past, will now support workloads from MS Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Virtual Server. It will be released for general availability in the fourth quarter, Kummert said.

Microsoft is testing hosted storage services. Read more here.

The new version also will include file-level deduplication and data recovery to the same server, a second server or a tape archive, Kummert said.

In an interview with eWEEK later in the day, Kummert said that Microsoft will continue to use its "familiarity" with IT-savvy and nonexperienced users alike in the storage sales wars.

"Generally, people dont like to have to learn something new," he said. "Theyd rather use something they already know, so if they already know Windows, theyll be able to move over and use Windows Storage Server and our other UDS [Universal Distributed Storage] products very easily."

That familiarity—plus the perceived general trustworthiness of the Microsoft brand—will help carry the storage division a long way, Kummert said.

UDS is the new, overarching strategy the Redmond, Wash., corporation is using to sell its storage products. UDS aims to develop cost-effective storage offerings for block- and file-based storage, and primarily for small and midsize businesses, he said.

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