Review: Storage Resource Management Suites

Most organizations manage their storage resources reactively. As the storage systems and SANs fill up, they add terabytes and track the additions with Excel spreadsheets. When nightly backups encroach on the business day, they might change the backup process. Database admins and systems administrators overprovision storage, because they're not sure they'll be able to get more when they need it. Otherwise, they pay little attention to what data is stored where. Snapshots, ad hoc backups and mirror copies that were meant to be temporary sit on the SAN forever, while the NAS becomes cluttered with iPod backups and multiple copies of PowerPoint presentations about products that were discontinued years ago.

SRM (storage resource management) applications can help get a handle on such inefficiency. A good SRM product can tell you at a glance how effectively your storage is being used and help you identify and solve your worst problems. Just install an agent on each server you want to manage, wait a day or so for data to be collected, and start running reports.

By eliminating duplicate files, removing inappropriate data and reducing overprovisioning, most organizations can decrease their storage use by 10 percent to 20 percent. That's well worth the cost of a typical SRM solution, considering the cost of each extra terabyte of storage.Vendors use the term SRM to describe two complementary product types. For the large enterprise market, the SAN fabric is the focus. Products such as Symantec's CommandCentral Storage and EMC's ControlCenter expose how much of your SAN array is available, how much is allocated to a particular volume or application, and how many snapshots and replication copies are scattered around your SAN. Vendors tell us that in the first weeks after installing an enterprise SRM solution, their customers typically find that 10 percent to 15 percent of the organization's SAN storage is in LUNs that aren't accessible to any hosts or in redundant replicas.

Another group of products gets the most out of the host. Where enterprise SRM products typically take a 30,000-foot view of the SAN and drill down to individual host volumes, host-centric SRM applications go beyond the utilization data and drill down into folders and files. An enterprise SRM app might tell you your Exchange Server's K: drive is 92 percent full, but the host-centric product also can tell you 32 percent of that capacity is Billy Jones' Inbox and, 93 percent of that is .MP3 files (what to do with young Billy is up to you).

From where we sit, analytics are the core of an SRM solution. Vendors may add both proactive and reactive features, such as automated provisioning, SAN switch management, automated reaction to storage events like full volumes, or even disk quotas and file screening, but you can't call your product SRM if it doesn't have analytics. An SRM solution also needs a console that lets storage administrators view the state of their environments and drill down to individual elements to identify problems.

We asked vendors to send us host-centric SRM solutions that could do such detailed user and file-type reporting on Windows- and Linux-attached storage. Most of these products have been around for at least three years, but all are maturing. This is especially true on the enterprise side, where standardized APIs are finally letting vendors build apps that can present heterogeneous SAN data. In general, this technology will serve anyone with more than 1 TB of server data.

We received six products in response to our call: EMC's VisualSRM, Tek-Tools Profiler, Symantec Storage Exec, Northern Parklife's Storage Suite, CA BrightStor SRM and NTP Software's Storage M&A and Storage QFS. Sun Microsystems declined our invitation, explaining that it is integrating Storability's SRM solution after several acquisitions. Softek simply passed without an explanation.After testing each SRM application by using it to monitor a set of 10 servers that would be typical for a small-to-midsize enterprise, we gave grades in six categories: reporting, trend analysis and capacity planning; price; console features and ease of use; platform and application support; quota management and file screening; and automated management.

EMC's VisualSRM took our Editor's Choice award, despite its high--but typically negotiable--list price, because of its impressive ease of use, automated management and ability to create a customized dashboard so each user can see the most relevant data at a glance. Tek-Tools' Profiler and Symantec's Storage Exec were close behind. If you want quota management, take a good look at Storage Exec. Tek-Tools' Profiler is worth considering if backup management is high on your list, especially with the recent upgrade to 4.0, which adds automated management to Profiler's strong analytics.

All the Data You Need

Although a good console can present most of the data a storage administrator needs, sometimes a report is just a better idea. Reports on duplicate files, for example, are more convenient than screens of data. You'll also need reports to distribute to the CIO and other execs, who might need to see utilization and trend analysis once a month.

A good report engine lets you filter reports to include only the data sources--hosts, volumes or applications--and those items in which the recipient is interested. The engine should save the report definition, let you schedule the reports and select a format; and deliver the reports over e-mail or another portal. That way, the Oracle DBAs can get reports on just their systems weekly and the CIO can get an overall storage report monthly.EMC's VisualSRM is a standout here, thanks to its strong report writer. Profiler excelled at trend analysis in our tests, presenting graphs on the console for whatever set of resources we selected. CA Brightstor offers a wide variety of reports. NTP's Storage M&A, meanwhile, is a disappointment--it lacks both scheduling and delivery for its meager set of reports.

SRM applications also should be able to project disk usage based on the rate at which your users and applications have been eating up space, so you can ask for more storage when your putting together next year's budget rather than the day the SAN gets maxed out. Tek-Tools' and Northern Parklife's products both provide good graphical trend displays and usage projections.

Most administrators say they just want to know how their storage systems are doing. Really, though, different information customers are interested in different data. Oracle DBAs want Oracle data and don't care what the Exchange servers are doing, for example. A good console quickly displays the collected data in server or application groups the user can define, so each person can find what he or she wants quickly.

EMC's VisualSRM has a customizable dashboard that lets users open the console directly to the data in which they're most interested. Profiler makes it easy to get to the data in which you're interested, especially when you want to drill down into a view to get to specific information. CA BrightStor SRM's console is slow and hard to navigate. As a result, even its best features become harder to use.

Platform and Application Support

All the products we tested collect data from Windows servers, but even if all your servers are running Windows, you can't completely manage your storage by looking at files alone. You need to take databases, e-mail servers and backup applications into account. For example, Oracle DBAs usually allocate 100 percent of a volume to their tablespaces. You can't tell whether they're hogging disk space as usual or are really running out of space unless your SRM solution can report how full the tablespaces are. With roots in Windows server management, Symantec's Storage Exec, NTP's Storage M&A and Northern's Parklife Storage don't support other platforms or applications beyond collecting file system data. Tek-Tools' Profiler has the broadest application support, especially for backups, but may not dig as deeply as others.

Users tend to be packrats with their e-mail mailboxes, and a good SRM solution can aggregate data from multiple servers to show you the biggest mailboxes and information stores. Detail-oriented solutions, such as EMC's VisualSRM, can delve into the Exchange store to tell you how much data is more than a year old, or how much space users are eating up in their "Deleted Items" folders.

Backup applications have notoriously bad reporting features--particularly when it comes to failed jobs. An SRM solution like Profiler, which collects data from the backup servers, can help administrators reduce the time they spend monitoring their backups, by reporting exactly which jobs succeeded and which failed, right on the dashboard. This is especially useful in organizations that use more than one backup application or server.

Quota Management

Although many organizations shun disk-space quotas, such quotas are effective in some circumstances. In certain situations, such as in schools that provide file storage space for students, or in cases where business critical data isn't affected, quotas can be useful. HSM (hierarchical storage management), ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) and other forms of file archiving and pruning are more appropriate ways to address data bloat. Still, we took quota management into account on our Report Card, and gave it a relatively light weighting.For quota advocates, Northern's Quota Server, NTP's QFS and Symantec's Storage Exec offer ways to stop users from storing their stuff all over your server. All three apps also provide good management: You can control quotas and view utilization across multiple servers at once. Storage Exec stands out in ease of use and flexibility, with unique features such as overdrafts and excepted users.

File screening--keeping users from storing certain types of files on the server--raises no controversy at all. No one wants to have to go to the CIO with a request for more storage because users are backing up their iPods to the the corporate network. Most administrators would like to ban .MP3 files from their servers and for those who want to block them completely, Symantec's Storage Exec would again be our tool of choice. It lets you permit, for example, only the marketing department to store .MP3s on the server. NTP's and Northern Parklife's suites provide the basics.

How Much Does It Cost?

Our list prices, as tested, ranged from just less than $7,000 for Symantec's Storage Exec to more than $22,000 for EMC's VisualSRM. The vendors use a variety of pricing models, from Northern's flat per-server price to EMC's pricing based on the aggregate amount of storage you want to manage, and Tek-Tool's model, which is based on the number of servers and applications on which you want to report. This mix of pricing scenarios, and the range of possible discounts even for relatively small customers, means you should get quotes, and negotiate, before choosing one product over another based on cost.

Automated Management

Sometimes passively reporting on the state of your storage environment isn't enough. We've seen Exchange servers crash because their transaction-log volumes filled up. The backup job that was supposed to perform log-file maintenance had been waiting for a tape change for 15 days and watched Web server logs eat up gigabytes of storage long after they'd lost any real value.

CA's BrightStor, NTP's Storage M&A and Symantec's Storage Exec can each send an alert or execute an external script when a volume or quota exceeds a given threshold. Northern's Storage Assistant is an event-driven task scheduler, but EMC's VisualSRM goes a step beyond, providing eight predefined actions--from sending an alert to deleting or compressing the files in a folder--when a threshold is crossed.

EMC VisualSRM Exchange Edition 1.7

In VisualSRM, EMC offers a complete mix of tools for active data management, querying and reporting, fronted by a highly customizable dashboard. Our Editor's Choice for its flexibility and depth, this product collects mailbox and folder-level data from Exchange servers, as well as database and tablespace information from SQL Server and Oracle databases. VisualSRM, a product of EMC's purchase of Astrum software, is especially well-suited to organizations whose Exchange admins, DBAs and other users would rather use an interactive dashboard than packaged reports.

VisualSRM takes about 15 minutes to install, and provides a wide range of platform support. Agents, which we pushed out to all of our test servers, run on common Unix and Linux systems, as well as all moderately current versions of Windows. Agents can collect file and folder data from local volumes, remote file shares or NFS mounts, so you can include your NetApp filers and that Windows NT 4.0 server the HR department just won't give up in your reporting.

Although VisualSRM supports SQL Server and Oracle for its repository, it's necessary to set up your own database server. Unlike the other vendors, EMC doesn't bundle Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine (MSDE). In fact, the company recommends that only the smallest sites--those with less than 500 GB of storage--use MSDE. Rather, EMC encourages sites with more than 10 TB to use Oracle over SQL Server, which could add to its already significant cost.

Each VisualSRM user easily can create a customized dashboard. We tailored ours to show agent status and the most-utilized volumes at startup. Oracle DBAs can see their most used tablespaces; other groups can view data on the servers for which they're in charge. You can use Active Directory groups to define administrators, who can schedule reports and define actions, and report viewers or build a new user table in VisualSRM.

VisualSRM doesn't include real-time disk quota or file type blocking, the way the products from Symantec, NTP and Northern do. However, this product uses Intelligent Actions, which let you define policies, such as moving or deleting files, zipping or compressing them in place, or staging them to another folder for a month. You can schedule nightly Intelligent Actions, such as deleting .MP3 files from users' home directories, as a substitute for file blocking. Alternatively, you can trigger the actions with a threshold policy using NTFS compression on Exchange Logs if the volume gets to be 90 percent full. We would have liked to block .MP3 files, but an Intelligent Action that quarantines the files overnight and sends the user an e-mail works, too.

In addition to the 35 built-in reports, which cover what most admins will need, VisualSRM includes a report writer based on Crystal Reports, so you can define your own. You also can schedule report generation and export to deliver reports to users that don't need access to the rest of VisualSRM.If you're not looking for real-time action for quotas or file blocks, consider VisualSRM. Although the $22,300 list price for our 5-TB environment is much higher than the prices quoted by the competition, EMC frequently gives significant discounts. We spent a few minutes on Froogle, and got an unofficial price of less than $10,000, though we based our Report Card grade on the list price.

Tek-Tools Profiler

Tek-Tools' Profiler, which took second place in a photo finish, combines the broadest application and platform support with an intuitive console to create a program that makes it easy to get a 30,000-foot view of your storage environment. Profiler can collect data from EMC and Xiotech disk arrays, Cisco MDS Fibre Channel switches and NetApp filers, as well as the more usual file system, volume and application data. In addition to the broad range of storage data you can manage with Profiler, this product can collect data from DNS servers and SNMP data sources. If the version we tested had been equipped with automated management (a feature found in the 4.0 release that shipped after our testing was complete), it might have edged out EMC's VisualSRM.

Profiler is especially strong at managing backup servers. Administrators get a view into the operation of eight different backup programs, including those of all the major players. When you select a backup server or client group, Profiler's console displays the amount of data backed up, throughput and the number of successful and unsuccessful jobs in both tabular and graphical forms. Tek-Tools consider backups so important that it displays a backup status box at the top of every Profiler screen along with a host status box.

Using the Profiler dashboard, organizations that use Networker for their Unix/Linux systems and Backup Exec for Windows servers, or another assortment of backup tools, can easily get a consolidated view of their backup results. Other than Profiler, we've only seen this kind of backup information from specialized solutions such as Bocada's Backup Reporter.Installing Profiler was painless, as it included the installation of the open source MySQL database engine and Apache server. However, since Tek-Tools lacks a push function, it's necessary to run the agent install program on each system you want to manage. Furthermore, we couldn't collect data from the Buffalo Terastation in our test setup. The generic NAS agent, which uses a Windows or Unix/Linux agent as a proxy, can only log into the generic NAS device as the user under which the agent service runs.

With data in the test bed's repository, we opened the console and saw overall server disk-space utilization and trend analysis. Pie charts showed capacity, and additional graphs showed utilization over time as well as projections of how full our file systems would be in 30 days and six months. Profiler makes it a dream to drill down into the data. Click on any displayed value--say, the number of file systems at 70 percent utilization--and you'll open a list of those file systems. When you get to a single host's data, Profiler displays CPU, memory and disk performance data in addition to utilization.

The only shortcoming we find in Profiler's analytics is that they don't go down to the file level, as some of the more workgroup-oriented programs do, such as VisualSRM and Storage Exec. If you run a file types report, for instance, you can't drill down to see every .doc file.

Although Tek-Tools didn't submit version 4.0 in time for testing, the new release adds automated management, which can trigger alerts or application execution from storage events such as backup failures or volumes that reach a capacity threshold. This addition addresses one of Profiler's weak points.

Symantec Storage Exec 5.3

Symantec's Storage Exec, formerly WQuinn's Storage Central, combines strong quota management and file blocking with low initial cost and a workgroup-oriented architecture that make the product a good fit for small or decentralized organizations.We installed Storage Exec on our report server and simultaneously pushed the remote server agent out to some of the other Windows servers in our test environment. By default, Storage Exec creates an Access database on the report server to use as its data repository. We started collecting data from just two servers with 35,000 files, but as the data increased beyond 750,000 files, report generation and other tasks got sluggish. Performance improved dramatically after we followed Symantec's directions to upgrade to SQL server.

Once we installed Storage Exec and fired up the console, the friendly Information Desk view made it easy to set up and track space allocation (quota) and file-blocking policies, then apply those policies to server drives and volumes. Storage Exec does an especially good job with these features. Space policies can be hard, soft or hard with "overdrafts" and can apply to users, folders or a combination of users and folders. Blocking policies also can be applied to users and/or folders with exceptions for privileged users.

Following the list of suggested tasks in Storage Exec's Information Desk, we ended up at Reporting, a one-stop shop with daily and weekly storage reports that were especially handy. These reports show disk space, folder size, duplicate folders and the other things most administrators need to see.

Surprisingly, given that Symantec sells two of the leading backup applications, Storage Exec doesn't report on backup server events, such as unsuccessful jobs. The "Files not backed up" report uses the archive bit and last modified date as evidence of a lack of backup rather than getting a report from the backup application. It does have a nice connection to Backup Exec, which provides a "Backup these files" link on reports.

Multiple report servers can store their data in a common SQL Server database, letting Storage Exec scale to manage a reasonably large number of file servers and NAS devices. With the Enterprise Administration Option, we created server groups and applied our reports and policies to groups of servers. Enterprise Administration stores its data in Active Directory and extends the AD schema to do it--which may scare some admins.Storage Exec can manage only that storage attached to Windows machines running its agent or Network Appliance filers. Users with Unix, Linux or other NAS data to manage, or that want to manage database storage will have to look elsewhere. This lack of support for additional platforms puts Storage Exec--along with NTP's and Northern Parklife's products--in a different class than the two frontrunners. Even NetApp users will notice that some features, such as high-water marks that remember a folder's maximum size and "Always save open files" won't work on NetApp filers.

Northern Parklife Storage Suite 2005

Northern Parklife, a Swedish company that's been a Windows SRM/quota management player since the bad old days of NT 3.1, has turned its quota manager into a whole suite of Windows storage management products: Quota Server, Storage Reporter, Storage Portal, Storage Assistant, and Storage Chargeback. Luckily, all five components are bundled into Northern Storage Suite 2005 at a single price. There's just one agent to install and you don't have to give yourself a headache figuring out which pieces to buy.

Storage Reporter's dashboard provides a quick look at your Windows storage environment, as well as access to a more detailed report generator. Although you can't create customized dashboard views for each user, you can create views for server groups, so different administrators can change the dashboard's focus to reflect their interests. The default dashboard views provide a good overview and ease of access to drilldown into data. Like Tek-Tools' Profiler, Storage Reporter also displays performance data.

Although Storage Reporter can collect data from remote CIFS file servers, it accesses local and remote resources using the account under which the Northern services run. As a result, the applications couldn't collect data from our Buffalo Terastation, which uses a different domain for authentication. People set up isolated servers for many reasons, but our testing suggests Northern can't manage them.Quota Server can enforce user space and object size quotas and made it easy for us to create a template that gave each user a 200-MB quota on his or her home directory--even for users that are created after the quotas are set. We also liked that quota options appeared on the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer. Quota Server doesn't support exceptions, so administrators can put data in a folder that's already full, the way NTP and Storage Exec do.

Storage Portal gives end users a view of the size of their home shares, how they're doing against their quotas and a way to ask for overdrafts or quota extensions. Administrators can set up automated responses. For example, VIP users can get their requested extensions without human attention.

Storage Assistant is an interesting, event-driven task scheduler. Assistants combine a set of Events and the actions that should be taken when those events happen. Event types include changes to a file or folder; time and calendar settings; and event frequency counters. You can use Boolean relations between events, so it's possible to trigger an assistant the fifth time a file changes, except on Sundays. Actions include replicating, copying and deleting files, sending an e-mail or Windows Messenger message, and sending a file via FTP or HTTP. We created an assistant that replicated our test network's home directory at 1 a.m. on the third Wednesday of the month if the log file had been updated. The script worked flawlessly.

Unfortunately, Storage Assistant isn't tied tightly enough to storage. It would be a much more useful member of this suite if it had events such as "Volume 90 Percent Full." Without it, you have to use Quota Server to set a quota when the volume is full, then execute programs when a 90 percent threshold has been crossed. We'd like to see better integration here.

Finally, Storage Chargeback can calculate bill back charges for files owned by users and/or files owned by groups using Windows primary group. We created charges for groups and assigned users primary groups. We set up different costs for mirrored and RAID-5 storage on servers and setup a rate scale to charge nothing for groups with less than 50 MB (since no one likes to get a bill for $.27) and a reduced rate for groups with more than 1 TB as a volume discount. Although some of the other products we looked at have chargeback reports, they're nowhere near as powerful as the ones in Northern Storage Suite.Northern's package is competent at most things and especially strong in the chargeback department. If quotas and chargebacks are important, you should download a copy and check it out.

CA BrightStor Storage Resource Manager r11.1

Imagine equipping a Ferrari with a rudder and handbrakes, and you'll understand the frustration we experienced with CA BrightStor Storage Resource Manager. Sure, it's powerful, but it's damn near impossible to get it to do what you want. It took two days to study BrightStor SRM's huge manual before we could generate even the simplest reports.

BrightStor SRM straddles the line between SAN-centric and host-centric SRM solutions, providing the kind of data collection to the file and volume level typically provided by host-centric products and interfacing to CA's BrightStor SAN Manager to collect switch, fabric and HBA data. Unfortunately, the complex user interface completely overshadowed this interesting ability.

We started out OK. It was simple to push out agents to other Windows servers to start collecting data. We even set up one of the Windows agents to act as a proxy to collect data from the low-end Buffalo NAS box on our testbed. BrightStor, unlike some of the other products, allowed us to specify a user account and password for the proxy collection.However, once we got past installation, we were stymied by BrightStor's console. For one thing, the product designer used too many sets of terms. For example, reports are also called views. When you schedule a report on Oracle tablespaces to be e-mailed to the Oracle DBAs, you must change the view destination to e-mail them. The console also wastes valuable screen real estate with a news section that links back to CA's Web site and z/OS menus even if you tell it you don't have any mainframes. Neither "feature" can be shut off.

The default display has sections titled "My Storage Summary," to which you can direct report and graph output and "My Storage Analysis," which gives you quick access to a set of reports you've preselected. It took half an hour to remove the "Total Storage by operating systems" graph, which reported that all the servers but our Buffalo box were running Windows Server 2003. You can't just click on "My Storage Summary" to control what's displayed there; instead, you have to find the "view" in a large tree and then deselect the console from that view's set of destinations.

When we selected a query or grouping of some sort, a window opened and took some time to populate with data. We couldn't tell if we were waiting for data to fill in or if there wasn't any data, until a CA rep pointed out the little yellow clock icon that appeared while the query was completed. It was especially difficult to get a quick view to verify that all agents were still properly communicating with the server.

If you can get past the considerable UI issues, BrightStor has a sizeable set of predefined reports including disk drive, database, exchange and backup reports that many products in this class are missing. Users of other CA management tools will probably find it easier to use than we did.

NTP Software Storage M&A

A longtime player in the Windows SRM market, NTP Software sells its data collection and reporting tool, Storage M&A, for Management and Analysis, and its disk quota manager, Storage QFS, for Quota and File Sentry, separately. If you're just looking for control or visibility you can avoid paying for the other.

If you're a typical tech, and don't bother reading the instructions before you pop the CD into the drive, you're likely to hit your first snag. Storage M&A requires IIS but neglects to check to make sure this crucial component is on your server. We spent a few minutes with the documentation and continued the process smoothly--at least until we discovered NTP also lacks a push install tool for agents. We installed the agents manually on the other servers, and changed the data-collection setting from the default (weekly at 1 a.m., starting the night after it's installed) to "daily," so we could identify shorter-term trends.

It didn't take long to walk through the 11 report buttons and view all of Storage M&A's reports. Storage M&A cannot filter reports by server. The program is also missing a report scheduler with e-mail or other delivery, and is limited to printing the same HTML data it sends to the console screen. There are some limited filters that you can save, but there's no real report writer and no scheduled or e-mailed report delivery. Providing your information customers with the varying sets of data they need means you will have to manually run reports for each of them.

Where Storage M&A is pretty minimalist, NTP's Storage QFS offers as much control as any quota tool we've seen. It took just a few minutes to create a disk quota policy that limited users' home directories in the "Student" and "Faculty" groups, but not those in the "NoLimit" group. It was just as easy to configure the policy to e-mail the users and server administrators when the directory, popup messages, and block access grew to cross various thresholds.

In addition to quotas, QFS supports file-control policies that can keep .MP3s out of folders and prevent users from writing to some file types. QFS's file-removal policies can delete files by type or age. Rather than just rely on file extensions, QFS can scan for an .MP3 signature, or even files within a ZIP file.Unlike most of the other programs we tested, however, M&A and QFS don't support file type groups. With other programs, you could run reports or create file blocking policies for the media files group, but with Storage M&A, you have to specify each file extension you want included in each report or policy definition.

We can really only recommend NTP's solutions to an organization more interested in keeping bad data off their servers than in keeping track of what's there. The analytics, which are the core of a good SRM solution, are weak, and even organizations with limited budgets would be better off with one of the more highly rated products.

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, a network design and consulting firm in Hoboken, N.J. Write to him at [email protected].

First Impression: Windows Server 2003 R2

With Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows is finally as good a file server as NetWare 3.x was 15 years ago. In those days of stone axes and 386 file servers, disk space was at a premium, and we set strict quotas to keep John, Jane and the marketing department from using more than their fair share of the gargantuan 300-MB drive on our server.

When we switched to Windows, many of us were shocked to discover that NT 4 had no disk quota facility and Windows 2000's quota functions were severely limited. While these limitations created a market for NTP and Northern Parklife's products, reviewed here, their absence has been noted by old timers and MS purists alike.With Windows Server 2003 R2, Microsoft's finally added quotas that can actually notify users that they're approaching or exceeding their quotas on a given folder. Even better, R2's File Server Resource Manager includes file screening and a basic set of storage reports--so you can stop users from cluttering up your server with multiple copies of Romeo Must Die.AVI.

With R2's basic reports, a very small or decentralized IT group could manage their servers successfully. The eight basic reports include information about duplicate and largest files, files by owner and quota utilization. You can schedule reports to run overnight and be delivered via e-mail in a variety of formats, from HTML to XML or CSV. If you're so inclined, you can slice and dice it even further. As your organization grows you'll want reports that cover more than one server and aren't limited to the 100 top objects. Windows Server 2003 R2 has left the door open for the more capable reporting engines of the products reviewed here.

How We Tested Storage Resource Management Suites

We installed each SRM application on the servers in Network Computing's Purchase College partner labs. For one week, we ran a series of scheduled scripts that created and deleted files under several user names. We ran reports on disk space usage by file type, to identify .MP3 files; user/owner; and volume utilization for all products. We also generated the best volume utilization/free space trend graph each program could generate. We then ran each program's reports and graphs to see how well these features reflected what occurred.

For those programs that could report on SQL server and/or Exchange server data, we ran space utilization reports by database and mailbox and a size of deleted items folder report for all users, using the application's report or query generator.

We created two groups of users (Watergate Participants and Pittsburgh Steelers) with user, group and home directory size quotas, and tested each application's response when users exceeded those quotas. We forbade the Watergate Participants from storing .MP3 files in their home directories, then tried to back up John Erlichman's iPod.Our test network consisted of five Windows file servers. Two of the servers contained 1-TB data volumes; one held a 2-TB volume, and two more held 300 GB. We also installed a low-end Buffalo Terastation NAS to test agentless data collection; two Exchange servers with 150-GB information stores; two SQL Server 2000 servers--one with a 400-GB database volume and the other with a 150-GB database volume--and a backup server running ArcServe and NetBackup 5.1.

Our test environment included a Qlogic SANbox 5200 Fibre Channel switch and an NEC S2500 disk array. Although some of the tested programs can collect data from some SAN devices, none reported on ours.

All Network Computing product reviews are conducted by current or former IT professionals in our Real-World Labs® or partner labs, according to our own test criteria. Vendor involvement is limited to assistance in configuration and troubleshooting. Network Computing schedules reviews based solely on our editorial judgment of reader needs, and we conduct tests and publish results without vendor influence.

Executive Summary: Storage Resource Management

What's on your employees' iPods? Whatever it is, it has no place on your company's NAS. Storage resource management applications give you the tools to keep personal files, redundant data and other space hogs off the network--and save as much as 20 percent of the space on your disk volumes.

We tested six SRM packages: EMC's Visual SRM, Tek-Tools' Profiler, Symantec's Storage Exec, Northern Parklife's Storage Suite, CA BrightStor SRM and NTP Software's Storage M&A and Storage QFS.We graded the packages on many characteristics--including reporting, trend analysis, capacity planning, features, ease of use, platform and application support, quota management, file screening, automated management and price. However, the programs' analytics--the ability to tailor and filter reports to your exact needs, project disk usage and identify trends--are the heart of successful storage management. Our Editor's Choice, EMC's Visual SRM Exchange Edition 1.7, excels in its analytical abilities, yet remains easy to configure and supports a broad range of platforms. Don't be put off by its high retail price; EMC frequently negotiates better deals.

R E V I E W

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