At the Sept. 8 Windows Server 8 Reviewers Workshop, keynote presenter Bill Laing, corporate vice president, Server and Cloud Division at Microsoft, touted all features of the forthcoming Windows Server 8, the server complement of Windows 8 client. And while most of Laing’s presentations focused on the expected, such as cloud technology, virtualization and scalability, an interesting theme presented was the change to how storage will be handled under Windows Server 8.
Namely, he discussed how Windows Server 8 offers simplification of storage provisioning and management of storage in general. The key sub-theme here was the ideology of storage virtualization, in the fact that wrapping physical storage into a virtualization layer makes storage much more flexible and easier to manage.
Many companies have delved into the realm of storage virtualization, identifying the need early on that storage can be complex and difficult to manage. The funny thing is that storage should never have become as complicated as it has, but external factors, ranging from business continuity, cross-platform support, security, compliance and countless others have fragmented the storage market into silos of technologies, which often don’t play well with each other.
From the users' point of view, all they want is access to their data files and applications; the underlying technology that makes that happen doesn’t matter to them at all, and rightly so. But, that very point of view is what complicates things for IT managers, who have to give the appearance of seamless access to data while managing multiple tiers of storage.
For administrators, managing those tiers has become a nightmare, especially when data has to be dynamic and moved across tiers on demand. For example, if a user needs a file that has moved down to tier 3 archive, that file has to traverse multiple tiers to move up to the tier 1 SAN. The technology, policies and administrative overhead to make that happen seamlessly for the user prove to be complex for the administrator.
Where Microsoft is heading with Windows Server 8 is to simplify that management and place all storage under a virtualized management tier, allowing focus to be shifted to files and not the storage technology itself. With that virtualization layer in place, storage becomes simple and elastic, allowing volumes of data to cross over multiple platforms and even the cloud.
It still remains to be seen if Microsoft can pull that off–nonetheless, it will be very interesting to see how the current crop of storage virtualization vendors deal with this latest threat from Microsoft. Will their businesses dry up, or will there be enough shortcomings in Microsoft’s implementation that will actually help out their businesses?
Frank Ohlhorst is an award-winning technology journalist, professional speaker and IT business consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the technology arena. He has written for several leading technology and business publications, and was also executive technology editor at eWEEK and director at CRN Test Center.
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