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Set Policies to Control Storage Growth
by Daryl D. Black

Daryl D. Black

Controlling storage growth has become an increasingly important issue in the enterprise. Uncontrolled growth can create a whole range of problems that can limit the effectiveness of your organization's IT staff. You might find your developers spend hours writing scripts to locate junk files, such as MP3s, that clog files servers' disk drives and violate the company's computer usage policy. Your systems administrators are likely being asked to manage more and more terabytes of storage space. And you might be wondering if assigning space quota limits to home directories and group directories is an effective way to make employees more responsible about what they store on a file server.

It's not that simple. Unlike application servers, file servers can house a myriad of content in different file formats—text, graphics, audio, and video—belonging to employees in several departments or the entire organization. If you don't know how employees use space, then storage growth can become unpredictable. You might be backing up content that doesn't need to be kept online, which can lead to buying disks you don't need, and, therefore, over-allocating space. Moreover, your systems administrators might be spending unnecessary hours doing manual tasks to keep servers from running out of space.

Controlling storage usage on file servers has to begin with a clearly defined network storage usage policy. Such a written policy for the corporate network-approved and supported by a CIO or another executive-enables an IT department to do two things: define the organization's requirements for how storage is used and managed, and establish the procedures and the tools for achieving these requirements.

This policy needs to be tied to your organization's business objectives and culture. It should clearly say what groups of employees use which storage devices, what they use them for, which types of files to store, and how long these files need to be stored for. The policy should also include granular details about how directory space is allocated and monitored; which files are blocked; how employees can request more space; which types of tools employees will have available for cleaning up space; and what space usage reports systems administrators are to run routinely and provide to management. (Precise SRM's white paper, "Guidelines for Implementing a Network Storage Resource Management Policy," provides a good overview of this subject. Download it at www.precise.com.)

To put some teeth into your policy, you should also consider storage resource management (SRM) tools, which can help you automate many of the procedures in your policy. Key SRM features for controlling file server growth include:

• Space Allocation: Provides a certain amount of space for users, directories, partitions, and drives; set a threshold on that space and send alerts to users as they reach thresholds.
• Reporting: Enables you to schedule and run reports automatically on file characteristics such as files with duplicates, files older than a year, and large new files. You can also get reports on space usage; for example, by users, share, directory, quota, and partition.
• File-type Filtering: Allows you to set filters on specific file types, such as MP3s, to scan and compile reports of those file types.
• File Blocking: Enables you to set filters on specific file types, such as MP3s, to scan and block these files from being stored and to send an alert to the person trying to store the file.

SRM tools usually consist of a service that runs the application, which is managed from a Web-based central console or GUI-based central console. The console acts as a mechanism for scanning monitored resources, a database that stores collected data from monitored resources, and a report generator that can output to various formats, such as HTML or Excel. When you support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), you can administer SRM tools also from network management systems, such as Tivoli and HP OpenView.

Before you put your policy in place and arm it with SRM tools, you need to devise a program for educating employees about two things: the need for a storage usage policy and the procedures, as well as the tools they can use to maintain their space. Without cooperation from employees, you won't be able to reap all of the benefits a policy backed by SRM. So you're right back where you started!

About the Author
Daryl D. Black is part of a team responsible for workplace technologies—storage, e-mail, video conferencing, and remote access—at TELUS Communications, a $7.2 billion communications company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.