In March the Redmond giant announced that it had acquired the intellectual property rights to start-up String Bean Software Inc’s iSCSI target software, which allows Windows 2003-powered machines to act as iSCSI-friendly data servers, or disk arrays.
Microsoft wants to see the software featured in every Windows-powered NAS box made by its OEM partners such as Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Dell Corp. We’ll sell it at a very compelling cost – we’re trying to make sure that the attach-rate will be 100%.
What that price will be remains secret. When String Bean first launched the software in 2004, it priced it according to the number of servers – or initiators – attached to it, with each initiator cost $250, up to a maximum charge of $2,500. Microsoft’s price, based on volume shipments, will obviously be in a different order of magnitude.
Given that Microsoft has been very active in making Windows an extremely storage-friendly OS, why has it not made this move before?
Two years ago we said we wouldn’t be in the iSCSI target market. We thought all targets would be on a very inexpensive chip. But that didn’t happen, said Microsoft storage manager Claude Lorenson. Those chips, which never emerged, have no connection with iSCSI adaptor cards, Lorenson said.
