Microsoft sure knows how to keep the pressure on the storage industry. Both the traditional and the hyper converged crowd now have heard the gloomy tolling of that big doomsday bell once again. The offerings for 3^rd party storage in the Wintel ecosystem will have to become better value for money once again in order to keep up or stay ahead.

I already wrote that here in TechEd 2013 Revelations for Storage Vendors as the Future of Storage lies With Windows 2012 R2 and poked some fun that the days of the easy big money in storage were over. Today storage vendors that do not adapt are going to feel that more than ever. One thing is for sure, there is no one size fits all and one trick ponies are not going to thrive.  Microsoft now covers hyper converged, converged and centralized storage solutions. SMB Direct is the backbone for high throughput, low latency transport. If you haven’t done so you might just take a peek at SMB Direct now and study up on DCB (PFC/ETS). No worries … I have done a lot of “pioneer” work in the field on this. But unfortunately I could not present an end-to-end configuration of SMB Direct over RoCE session here at Ignite. But there are other opportunities.Storage replication completes the story while Storage QoS is giving is long needed control. So let the FUD fly, sit back and enjoy the show. Remember, when you’re catching lots of FLAK, you’re over your target