Microsoft plans all-out assault on NAS market

03.04.2006
Microsoft Corp. this week plans to launch an iSCSI initiator that allows servers to perform diskless boots from storage-area networks without expensive and specialized host bus adapter (HBA) network cards.

The company is also expected to discuss at the Storage Networking World conference in San Diego this week its plan for a future upgrade to its storage offering that can be used to create an enterprise-level clustered network- attached storage (NAS) system.

The new iSCSI feature pack for Windows Storage Server 2003 Release 2 is slated to ship by midyear, Microsoft said.

Claude Lorenson, group product manager for the storage division at Microsoft, said the company has been working with IBM to ensure that the upgraded iSCSI initiator supports IBM's BladeCenter technology.

The joint effort aims to allow the use of a common network interface card to transfer block-level data between IBM servers and Microsoft back-end storage devices.

Alan Hunt, manager of operations at Dickinson Wright PLLC in Detroit, has been booting his IBM BladeCenter from a Microsoft SAN for almost a year, but he has been forced to use special HBAs from QLogic Corp.