Craig Fletcher, IT operations manager at Arcadis G&M Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Highland Ranch, Colo., said the storage resource management tools used to discover and monitor equipment on his storage-area network (SAN) have been helpful during the test period.

However, Fletcher said he also found that Windows Server R2 lacks the robust reporting capabilities necessary for data replication.

"We'd like to be able to look at the status of replication from a branch office to the hub site in real time, as well as receive automated e-mail summaries of the previous days' [business] so we know that replication [and] backups are working well," Fletcher said.

Today, he said, "we have to manually run a report if we want to know what is going on."

Fletcher said he expects Microsoft to include those automation features in future releases. Some Problems Solved