This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as applications) with the nuts and bolts of storage infrastructure. These discussions often revolve around the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.

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Although it’s been available for a while now, Windows Server 2008’s storage changes aren’t widely reported. TechTarget’s Dave Raffo wrote a piece about it today, Windows Server 2008’s hidden storage features, including some quotes from me, but it’s still less than clear.

So let me sum up:

1. Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is probably the biggest news.  Microsoft re-worked this protocol for Vista and 2008 to reduce chattiness, combine multiple commands in a single packet, and allow larger packets.  This should improve performance for just about everyone, but is only in those two operating systems right now.
2. The excellent multi-path I/O (MPIO) driver from Microsoft is also included right out of the box, including device-specific modules for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel.  This is the first version of Windows to come with MPIO, though it’s available with the iSCSI initiator and OEM drivers for other versions.
3. As in Vista, Server 2008 allows you to shrink NTFS filesystems on the fly.  It’s not quite as flexible or forgiving as some third-party tools, but it’s certainly easy to use!  Just go into the disk administrator snap-in and try it for yourself.
4. Windows finally has the option to leave new LUNs alone instead of trying to mount them.  This was one of those things that gave Windows a rep as a bad neighbor in SAN environments.
5. NTBackup is gone, replaced by a new Server Backup MMC snap-in.  I haven’t tried it, but I hope it’s better than the one that comes in Vista!  I ended up keeping NTBackup around on my laptop…
6. A new MMC snap-in called Storage Explorer lets you manage WMI-compliant SAN devices.
7. The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and DFS interfaces are improved and are now scriptable.
8. Server 2008 now automatically aligns filesystem boundaries with storage, which was one of those dark and secret skills us storage guys used to share amongst ourselves.  This can increase performance in high-I/O environments.
9. NTFS (in both Server 2008 and Vista) now has symbolic link support, just like UNIX and Mac OS X.  Note that this got mangled in the TechTarget article.
10. NTFS was also tuned and tweaked a bit for better stability and crash recovery.

Even though storage virtualization technologies have been on the market for 20 years or more, and numerous companies have tried to sell it as a product in its own right for at least half that long, many are still unsure of what to do with the technology.  A great new piece by Dave Raffo, News Director at SearchStorage.com, discusses the wide variety of virtualization solutions and the real impact they can have.

Dave called me for this piece, and I was pleased with the question.  Truth be told, there really are compelling benefits from virtualization, but most folks have been waiting for a real “must have” killer application for the technology.  In order for this tech to make the impact it should, we in the industry have to change some of our thinking:

• Storage virtualization means more than just Fibre Channel block aggregation.  There are great applications inside servers and arrays and in the NAS world, too.
• Speaking of NAS, Microsoft DFS is probably the most-implemented storage virtualization product, and just about every NAS array has cool aggregation and migration features.
• Virtualization is a feature, not a product.  HDS has seen the amazing potential for block virtualization in migration and storage flexibility, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Storage and server virtualization go well together - so well, in fact, that ESG reports that 24% of those who have implemented the latter are also using the former!