Craig Fletcher, IT operations manager at Arcadis G&M Inc. , an environmental consulting firm in Highland Ranch, Colo., has been beta-testing Windows Server 2003 R2 for the past six months and said he's very happy with the storage resource management tools used to discover and monitor equipment on his storage-area network (SAN).
While the first two beta versions of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2 software had bugs, the final version released to him six weeks ago is "flawless." He said the main shortcoming of the software, which was released to manufacturing this week (see "Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003 R2"), is a lack of robust reporting for data-replication functions.
"We'd like to be able to look at the status of replication from a branch office to the hub site in real time," Fletcher said. He added that he wants to see "automated e-mail summaries as to the previous days' summary totals on replicated data, so we know that replication [and] backups are working well."
Although Microsoft told him those features will be available later, "right now, we have to manually run a report if we want to know what is going on," Fletcher said. Arcadis G&M uses the software's distributed file system to replicate snapshots of file data from branch offices to a central data center, replacing direct attached tape backup.
Prior to installing the software, the company's 75 branch offices had a number of problems related to backing up 240 Wintel servers, including the use of untrained personnel to handle tapes and backup failures that caused data losses. Fletcher said he not only likes the disk-to-disk replication features, but also the continuous data protection features that give him a single, central copy of all file data.
"Now, if they do lose that [branch office] file server, we can use the distributed file service and point users straight to here," he said. "The downtime for end-users is virtually nothing, while we're recovering the branch server that crashed."
Performing incremental backups of file data automatically to the company's main data center has greatly reduced administrative overhead and data losses, Fletcher said, although he could not say by exactly how much.
"The only thing I think really needs to be addressed by Microsoft is biometrics," said Jeff Cohen, CIO of DestiNY USA , a proposed 800-acre retail complex in upstate New York that will be powered entirely by environmentally friendly energy sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels.
Cohen has been beta-testing Storage Server R2 for six months and likes how it integrates with a 22TB SAN powered by a high-end EMC DMX1000 array. So far, he said, there have been no problems with the software's ability to discover and monitor all of the components on the SAN.
Cohen has also used the software's storage resource management functions and praised its ability to automatically backup snapshots of files back to a central data center and share large multigigabyte files. He said he prefers Microsoft's utilities to those from EMC Corp. because he has been assured that new version of the software should work smoothly with his setup. Cohen said he's grappled with EMC's storage management software in the past, and while he does finally get that software to work, it often takes an EMC engineer on site to help.
"Maybe the EMC utility gives you more information than the Microsoft utility, but the reality is [that] the Microsoft utility works," he said.
John Webster, a storage analyst at Data Mobility Group LLC in Nashua, N.H., said that the Windows Storage Server R2 release is largely an "incremental" improvement on earlier versions. But Microsoft is nonetheless sending a powerful message, he said, by continuing to add advanced storage functions to the operating system and trying to make those features ubiquitous among Windows users.
"The only other source for this kind of thing is potentially the open-source community -- and we haven't seen the open-source community have much of an impact on storage," Webster said.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, Microsoft's group product manager in the Windows Server Division, said it will be four or five months before resellers go to market with Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 features in their products.