Bits in a Box

To understand where Windows Storage Server 2003 came from, take a walk with me down memory lane. Think back to, say, 1998 or so, when a good-sized server might have a pair of 18GB disks and a large Exchange mailbox store might take up 8GB or 9GB. In that environment, the cost of storage was driven primarily by the expense of buying hard disks and supporting hardware, such as RAID controllers.

Since then, the storage landscape has changed dramatically. Many companies have large storage farms, and I know at least a dozen people who have multiterabyte storage capacities in their homes. The purchase price of storage continues to drop rapidly, but the cost of maintaining that storage is, at best, trending downward by only a couple of percent each year¡ªin some environments, maintenance costs are actually increasing.

The problem, of course, is that demand for storage is skyrocketing. Users are storing more and more information in their mailboxes, and Exchange Server 2003¡¯s site and server consolidation features result in larger numbers of mailboxes finding their way onto fewer servers. . . .