Users Cautious on Microsoft Upgrades: Page 3 of 4

"We're more worried about the interaction between Active Directory and Exchange and Vista," she says. "There are a lot of good features but it's sort of a forklift upgrade, not right off the bat, but look down the road -- your hardware has to support it, and you have to get a handle on how secure it is, how much training your users need, and how much it changes your support."

Kossuth says the biggest impact on storage comes from Exchange 2007. "The real benefit is it's easier to retrieve and find information, and it gives users more choice for setting up files and security settings," she says. "People use email as a filing system -- that's not what it's for, but that's how people use it. It [Exchange 2007] makes it easier for users to email audio and graphics files. Those things will be on the toolbar, and if you put it on the toolbar for Exchange, people will use it. That will clearly increase the amount of information we have to store."

She says only testing will tell if new Microsoft features are preferable to tools she is already running, such as firewalls and virtual servers. "Microsoft is a little late to the game in some of this, and a lot of people are using other tools," Kossuth says. "If it's simpler to go to Microsoft for those features, that makes sense. But we don't know yet."

For David Stevens, senior systems consultant Carnegie Mellon University, a major issue is testing Vista with dozens of applications running on the lab PCs connected to CMU's SAN.

"We have a lot of application interoperability testing to do before we can upgrade to Vista," Steven says. "We have 400 public lab PCs, and each machine runs between 70 and 80 applications. And we can only test by letting the students use all these apps and see what happens."