Section 7.11. Summary

   

---

7.11 Summary

Storage management is a problem that is increasing in importance as the amount of storage hardware deployed grows. Several vendors have provided solutions, but most of them are proprietary in nature. The Storage Networking Industry Association is making an effort to standardize storage management using the Common Information Model. Microsoft has also adopted a trend to have storage management available from either a GUI application or a command-line utility. The intent is to enable storage management via scripting.

Microsoft is building infrastructure into Windows NT for storage management. The virtual disk service will provide a standardized way for management applications to discover and manage storage resources. The virtual disk service also allows storage hardware vendors to provide information about their devices to these management applications in a standardized way. Similarly, the fabric virtualization service (for which very few details are yet available) will allow fabric management in a standardized way.

Windows 2000 also includes a comprehensive infrastructure for Hierarchical Storage Management that is fully integrated with the other pieces of the operating system and includes applications such as the Explorer GUI, command-line window, backup application, and job scheduler.

---

Top