Management utility vendor NTP Software last month unveiled policy-based storage management software that lets net professionals easily plan, monitor and control storage utilization and capacity on their enterprise nets.
The software, called Storage Sentinel 2000, includes the capability to show how much disk space is available on storage arrays and disks and how well that data is being used. The package lets customers create policies that govern the amount of disk space allocated to users on the network or execute processes that protect the network. For instance, Storage Sentinel can detect when a suspect Visual Basic script file from an e-mail has been saved to a drive and prevent the proliferation of the file to other servers or directories.
“To use the hard disk space in the best way I can without buying new hard disks, I need a quota manager to allocate space for the personal directories of each of my users,” said an administrator at grocery chain Conad, in Bologna, Italy, who requested anonymity. Conad has six Windows NT Servers in an NT File Systems partition with 200 local users and 600 users in remote locations. With Storage Sentinel, he can set storage quotas automatically and monitor when disk space is filling up.
Storage Sentinel runs on any Windows NT or 2000 server and is managed from an NT workstation. Sentinel monitors and controls the capacity and disk utilization of external storage whether on the network, attached locally or remotely to servers.
Network managers can implement policies systemwide or selectively with Storage Sentinel 2000. For instance, you may want everyone in a group of users to have access to a certain amount of disk space for their personal files. You can deny users in the accounting department access to payroll records but let the payroll clerk in the same department have access.
NTP plans to extend Storage Sentinel 2000 to Solaris and Linux by year-end.
To establish policies, network managers use a template to point and click on options. This interface appears to the user as a dialogue box containing a variety of objects that can be selected. Once the template is created, a script executes it. For simple environments with few servers, built-in reports exist. For more complicated configurations, the data can be saved to several common file formats for import into other applications. Information gathered by Storage Sentinel can be fed to Tivoli Management Environment and CA-Unicenter TNG.
Storage Sentinel 2000 is available for US$1,500 per server and US$125 for each workstation. For more information, see the company’s Web site at www.ntpsoftware.com.
