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.