ADVANCES IN WINDOWS NT STORAGE MANAGEMENT

Windows NT 5.0 introduces fundamental changes to storage management. T he new infrastructure in NT 5.0 can adapt to future changes in storage devices and media, brings a more powerful set of management mechanism s, and supports more base services within the system. Most of the chan ges are transparent to legacy applications and to users, but software producers who to deploy advanced functionality should realize increase d benefits from the underlying infrastructure. Windows NT now supports the dynamic plug-and-play of storage devices and the growth and mount ing of storage volumes. It also frees the NT system from drive letter limitations and incorporates several new file system features to aid t he development of enterprise-class storage management solutions. This article describes two new mechanisms present in Windows NT 5.0, the re liable change journal and the reparse points. It also presents storage management infrastructure subsystems and services that help administe r storage. Both mechanisms are designed to facilitate the robust and e fficient administration of an increasing volume of data whose lifetime grows over time.