Microsoft MPIO

The Microsoft MPIO architecture provides hardware and software vendors with a means of creating Microsoft MPIO solutions that work effectively with the Windows Server operating system to provide organizations with reliable I/O path support on Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Storage Server 2003 platforms.

 Organizations of all sizes can now benefit from increasingly flexible multipathing solutions in Windows environments. Once only affordable by enterprise organizations (who generally purchased end-to-end storage solutions from a single vendor), high availability and high performance multipathing storage solutions are increasingly in demand from midsized organizations whose storage network configurations routinely consist of multi-vendor devices.

 By providing a single interface through which vendors each develop their own device-specific multipathing solutions, the Microsoft MPIO architecture not only ensures compatibility within current and future Windows platforms, but also prevents the multi-vendor device incompatibilities that have plagued previous multipathing solutions. These advantages bring multipathing solutions to midsized and small businesses, and offer enterprise customers greater flexibility in the storage solutions they adopt, allowing them to maintain existing enterprise solutions while also adding less expensive storage solutions to support storage management scenarios.