Disk Space Management

Currently, all administrative tasks relating to the maintenance and monitoring of database storage is automated. Providing we all live in the 21st century and we have a wide range of software products for managing disk space.

But despite great progress in storing and managing data bases (monitoring and verification, and regular reports to the full graphics file servers based on various parameters of information: volume, origin, type, age, etc.), control of large volumes of information remains a very serious problem. Of course, you can find a lot of decisions, but is too early or too costly.

Many business software for disk quotas, particularly the low price range, based on the scanning method of periodic occupation of file storage. In particular, the lack of supervision is post-factum, and you should make corrections for subsequent manual analysis of the state and the release of resources after the user exceeds the quota.

On the other hand, all physical devices have capacity limits, but we do not need to keep in mind one of the advanced techniques for working with her. So the best way to manage disk quotas is likely the capacity of physical disks, but for each application individually, and with the power of analytical methods and tools.

However, the very effective approach for managing disk space is based on methods in real time, which helps manage storage capacity such as equipment, but with all the benefits such as notifications / alerts, tools Analysis rich, and more. And of course, it will be nice to be cheap.

Technically, the management of boundaries in real time, it is necessary to help manage Windows-based quotas, which is the focus of file activity in real time. And the only point where any file operation can be stopped before data stored on disk. Fortunately, Windows (2003 R2) is a support file quota in the area, so for simple cases, there is already a solution. But what if there is a need for additional functionality based on the same way as extensions blocked or cases of integration with 3rd party tools?

First, describe the basic features we really need:

* Of course, real-time management.
* Big set of hardware and software options supported, as virtual drives, RAID, NAS, and many other hardware solutions.
* Clusters and distributed file systems support.
* Rich set of significant alerts to help users and administrators to find files with quotas too small or too big.
* Analytic.
* Support scripting. In fact, this option is very important if we need to do bulk operations to quotas.
* Rich options of integration with 3rd party software. Including wide range of backup / restore tools, archiving tools, and others.
* Ability to associate director of operations on these files user quotas.
* Ability to manage the file contents. For example, a server such as newspapers is not necessary to participate in user accounts.
* Making life more difficult for users if they decide to use the resources of the server to collect the unauthorized content (eg multimedia).
* Full integration with our Active Directory.
* And of course the ability to perform fully automated storage: enabling users to solve problems if the quotas are filled.

Fortunately, we found a solution that realizes all the options, and offers much more. It winquotes (http://www.winquota.com). It has all the options we need, and those of others such as management support based on the Web (more usual one).

I tried using winquotes, and I see this tool is really interesting. It works exactly as I need - in real time and automatically without administrator intervention. By specifying the quota hard, I worked in the same way as to limit the capacity of hard disk: it can not be exceeded simply. On the other hand, soft limit is useful.