Storage I/O's lead analyst, Greg Schulz, sees these features as Microsoft finally owning up to the reality that storage management is no longer a peripheral to the Windows operating system but is needed as part of its core ecosystem. Schulz cites Vista's new transactional file system as evidence that Microsoft is finally getting serious about storage. "A journaling file system makes Vista more than just a platform to run games on," says Schulz.

File system improvements

Vista's Transactional NTFS, like Longhorn's transacted file system (TxF), allows users to preserve data integrity during unexpected error conditions. For example, if a computer fails while an application is saving information to disk, the data may be corrupted since the save operation is only partially completed. To prevent this from occurring, TxF opens the file in transacted mode, saves the file and then commits the transaction. If the system fails during the save operation, it restores the file to its pre-save condition which prevents file corruption.

The Vista file system also includes major revisions to support the SMB (Server Message Block) 2.0 protocol. One major pain point that SMB 2.0 addresses, is the chattiness of the SMB 1.0 protocol, according to Navjot Virk, a Microsoft Software Design Engineer. "SMB 2.0 supports an arbitrary, extensible way of compounding operations to reduce round trips making it less chatty than SMB 1.0", says Virk.

Vista manages file handles, as well. SMB 2.0 increases the number of concurrent open file handles that a server can support and the number of shares that a server can share out. SMB 2.0 also provides more durable file handles which prevents clients from loosing connectivity to servers if short network glitches occur.