MSFT adds support for Fibre Channel

From The Register: bq. Microsoft has already claimed a nice chunk of the NAS (network attached storage) market and has even been a firm backer of the emerging iSCSI protocol. However, the engineers in Redmond have tended to balk when higher-end Fibre Channel-based SANs come up. bq. But Microsoft has now released a new Fibre Channel Information Tool, designed to let customers see SAN systems from a server running Windows Server 2003. The tool basically looks out over a SAN and gathers relevant hardware configuration information. It will ship as a free download in May with companies such as Emulex, LSI Logic and QLogic lining up behind it. bq. Customers will also find new Windows Server 2003 software for "tracing" communications between storage and server systems in a SAN. This tool will arrive with Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003. Sweeeet! Fibre Channel is the way to go when you have multiple computers sharing a common pool of disk drives. It allows for all sorts of configurations and has very high performance. It used to be that you needed to use specialized software provided by the Fibre Channel manufacturer and it was always expensive and never fit into the management console. Having an integrated management tool will be great.