Inside Windows Storage: Server Storage Technologies for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Beyond

Efficient and cost-effective storage management is an increasingly important requirement for solving various problems that the modern-day industry faces. These problems include the following:

• The ever increasing amount of storage deployed is forcing an increase in storage administration personnel, even as the amount of storage administered by individual administrators is on the rise. The significant cost reduction for disk storage ( especially lower-end disks) has also contributed to the ever increasing rise in deployment of storage.

• The storage subsystem requirements have become more onerous in terms of tolerating less and less downtime.

• The operating environment has moved from a single storage vendor deploying a high-end solution in a large corporation environment to a multitude of operating system and storage solution vendors deployed in smaller corporate environments. The problems are compounded by a need to control costs and the large number of vendor-proprietary management solutions from the various storage vendors .

As emphasized in the introduction, this is not a how-to book. So rather than explaining the various GUI tools that can be used for storage management (e.g., disk administration), this chapter describes the architecture and technologies that can be (and are) used for storage management.

This chapter starts with an introduction to the DMTF-defined and SNIA-adopted management model called the Common Information Model (CIM). The introduction to CIM is followed by a description of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is Microsoft's implementation of CIM. Following an overview of storage virtualization, the Microsoft vision for storage virtualization ”including its disk and fabric virtualization services ”is described. Next the chapter describes the SNIA and Microsoft HBA API approaches. That discussion, in turn , is followed by a description of Microsoft's Hierarchical Storage Management architecture as it first appeared in Windows 2000. Finally, the chapter ends (as it began ) with a storage management standard from the Storage Networking Industry Association originally code-named Bluefin, now formally known as the Storage Management Initiative (SMI).