With Windows Storage Server continuing to win over small and mid-size customers — with a 53 percent unit share of the 2005 worldwide NAS and unified storage market, according to Gartner — and Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 making inroads into the enterprise space, Microsoft appears to be the vendor to beat in the storage server space. While that is clearly not good news for the competition, Microsoft customers (at least some of them) aren't complaining.

"We had been a Novell eDirectory/Novell NetWare shop for authentication and file and print," says Rob Summers, enterprise network planner and integrator at Intermountain Healthcare, a 27,000-employee nonprofit healthcare system based in Salt Lake City.

The problem was that all of Intermountain's clinical applications, both the ones it developed in house and its third-party applications, used Microsoft Active Directory, not Novell's eDirectory.

"In the healthcare vertical, there aren't a lot of third-party tools or applications being written for healthcare delivery that leverage eDirectory or NetWare," says Summers.