Users Cautious on Microsoft Upgrades

Judging from the hype from Microsoft and its many storage partners, today is the official opening of the "Get Ready for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007" season.

Storage systems, services, archiving, and security vendors have been quick to point out their support for the new Microsoft software on the day it officially launched. (See Symantec Manages Exchange, Zantaz Supports Exchange, HP Intros Portfolio, CA Archives, and EMC Backs New Windows.} Still, there is little indication that customers are ready to upgrade en masse.

While the immediate effect on storage networks will be minimal, the upgrades will eventually touch just about everybody. A great deal of time will be spent on implementing the new software, training users and admins, and managing infrastructures that may change significantly with the enhancements. (See Processing Vista: Is Your CPU Up to It?.)

Of all the new Microsoft offerings, Exchange 2007 is perhaps the most important for storage admins, because backing up and archiving email is a big reason for employing networked storage.

That doesn't mean there will be a mad rush of migrations from Exchange 2003, though. At least not right away. Keith McCall, CTO of Exchange-managed services firm Azaleos, estimates that about 10 percent of Exchange seats will be migrated to 2007 by the end of its namesake year. He says it might take three years for most Exchange users make the transition."Moving the mailboxes is not a huge deal," McCall says. "Reading through 6,000 pages of documentation that tells you how to operate Exchange 2007 is a big deal. There's a tremendous amount of retraining necessary."

If McCall's timeframe is right, then IT VP Joe Martins of furniture retailer Design Within Reach intends to be an early adopter. Martins says he's eager to get the improved search functionality of Exchange, which could help with e-disccovery.

"We'll probably do the upgrade in 2007," Martins says. "We're interested because usually Microsoft's new versions get better and faster and easier. The new search is supposed to be much faster and it can be integrated with Vista search capabilities."

As for the new Vista operating system, Martins says: "I'll probably keep my eye on that a little bit longer. I have an eval copy on my desktop at home. It is very different [from Windows XP]. So, from a change management standpoint, it's different enough for the IT staff to have to find where everything is, and different enough for our user community to have to be trained on it."

Other users are treading cautiously. Joanne Kossuth, CIO of Olin College of Engineering, is also interested in the search capabilities of Exchange, as well as better encryption and improved support for files, virtual operating systems, and mobile devices closes -- next summer at the earliest. That's partly because it's impossible to do major upgrades while school is in session -- and also because the IT team needs time to test the new OS and apps."We're more worried about the interaction between Active Directory and Exchange and Vista," she says. "There are a lot of good features but it's sort of a forklift upgrade, not right off the bat, but look down the road -- your hardware has to support it, and you have to get a handle on how secure it is, how much training your users need, and how much it changes your support."

Kossuth says the biggest impact on storage comes from Exchange 2007. "The real benefit is it's easier to retrieve and find information, and it gives users more choice for setting up files and security settings," she says. "People use email as a filing system -- that's not what it's for, but that's how people use it. It [Exchange 2007] makes it easier for users to email audio and graphics files. Those things will be on the toolbar, and if you put it on the toolbar for Exchange, people will use it. That will clearly increase the amount of information we have to store."

She says only testing will tell if new Microsoft features are preferable to tools she is already running, such as firewalls and virtual servers. "Microsoft is a little late to the game in some of this, and a lot of people are using other tools," Kossuth says. "If it's simpler to go to Microsoft for those features, that makes sense. But we don't know yet."

For David Stevens, senior systems consultant Carnegie Mellon University, a major issue is testing Vista with dozens of applications running on the lab PCs connected to CMU's SAN.

"We have a lot of application interoperability testing to do before we can upgrade to Vista," Steven says. "We have 400 public lab PCs, and each machine runs between 70 and 80 applications. And we can only test by letting the students use all these apps and see what happens."Exchange isn't CMU's primary email system, but Stevens says he expects to upgrade and hook Exchange into his SAN. "We know we're going to have to do that soon, but we'll have to test that rigorously too," he says. "The cool feature of Exchange 2007 is better clustering capabilities out of the box. You can run one Exchange box in your regular data center with one half of a cluster and put the other half of the Exchange cluster in a remote data center, and it would work."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch