"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.