SafeCapacity-SRM^™ Storage Resource Management

The explosive growth rate of storage has created a critical need for tools that allow companies to understand how their storage environment is being used or possibly misused.  Storage administrators and corporate management need tools that allow them to both monitor and control this important asset.  Without a clear view of storage capacity utilization and effective tools to control storage assets, there can be no verification that storage resources are properly aligned with business needs or an easy way to right size the underlying infrastructure.

SafeCapacity-SRM solves this problem by providing a central view of storage resources and their specific usage.  Supporting Windows, Linux, Unix and NAS, SafeCapacity-SRM is a perfect fit in any open systems environment.  You can use SafeCapacity-SRM software both for planning storage allocation and for long-term data analysis and reporting, as well as for more operational tasks such as warning of improper usage of storage, automatic removal of non-qualified file types, data life-cycle management or alerting and preventing system crashes from out-of-disk conditions.

     SafeCapacity provides the following significant benefits to its users:

• Delivers clear, file-level reports on storage utilization.
• Increases the efficiency of existing storage, reducing the need to add additional high-end capacity.
• Reduces over-capacity allocation of storage space.
• Transparently migrates files across devices to cost balance storage resources.
• Eliminates out-of-disk-space events.
• Reduces system administration time monitoring storage systems by twenty percent.
• Provides a robust front-end management system for handing fixed-content data.

Visual data representation - SafeCapacity's included SRM (Storage Resource Management) feature allows IT management to easily make storage decisions based on graphical reports that provides file information on:

• Days Since Modified 
• Days Since Accessed
• Statistics by Size of File 
• Count by File Extension
• Space by File Extension
• Complex combinations of the above combined with additional file attribute matching.

Example Report (Click on image to view more examples)

These visual data representations provided by SafeCapacity allows users to easily identify 

• Improperly allocated storage
• Storage intensive users or applications
• Files that are candidates for relocation
• Match data location to physical storage by access time and price per megabyte.
• Existence and quantity of illicit data types that may be stored in violation of corporate rules

Creating Reports - SafeCapacity-SRM provides detailed reports on disk usage for storage administrators and managers which allows them to make effective decisions on storage allocation.  The reports can be generated either ad-hoc or at scheduled intervals and provide a way of looking at storage usage for a particular moment as well as to help in identifying trends over time. The highly portable nature of the reports created by SafeCapacity allows them to be  easily consolidated in a central location while being viewed from any point on your network.

Efficient use of storage resources - SafeCapacity-SRM provides an average 20% cost savings by increasing user storage efficiency by automatically migrating less accessed files to archival storage, reducing storage growth rate on high end storage.  Users can choose to have less frequently used files automatically compressed in-place or routed to less expensive and storage systems.

Optimization of High Speed storage - For high-end environments, SafeCapacity's Hotfile option allows for easy identification and transparent migration of hot files to faster storage without requiring modification to applications.  SafeCapacity maintains the high speed I/O data rates delivered by the faster storage through its pass-through relocation method, guarantying that critical applications receive the performance they need.  By continuously monitoring and maintaining optimum file I/O performance in mixed storage device systems SafeCapacity-Hotfile delivers near perfect IOPS [input/output per second] levels. 

Automated capacity management - SafeCapacity automates data optimization and life-cycle management using "Set and Forget" policies. System administrators no longer need to closely monitor storage on each individual file system or spend hours on end juggling physical file placement to meet business needs.

Planning and implementing an archiving strategy is far simpler with SafeCapacity.  After the initial run of SafeCapacity's SRM function has completed users will have a solid analysis of the general layout of their data.  For instance, with the generated reports one can easily identify and quantify all files that have not been modified in more than n-number days.  This information can than be used to create a data migration policy for SafeCapacity. 

Automatic data life-cycle management - SafeCapacity is designed to monitor disk space usage and alert as well as prevent over-utilization of storage.  The administrator defines information life-cycle policies for each storage resource, and SafeCapacity will monitor these objects and enforce the administrative limits by migrating targeted files to another device when they've reached the effective limit on the monitored device.

Continuous storage availability - SafeCapacity virtually eliminates downtime caused by out-of-disk-space events by monitoring remaining free space and automatically freeing additional space when needed, within seconds.

Cost savings - The ability to balance storage resources by segmenting data based on business rules allows users of SafeCapacity to achieve enormous cost savings.  By following user configurable storage policies SafeCapacity automatically categorizes and transparently migrate files to other storage devices at scheduled intervals freeing storage administrators from this previously tedious and time consuming task.

Management by automated alerts - Administrators may now manage their storage either by exception or proactively.  SafeCapacity provides a unique and revolutionary, real-time approach to managing storage resources.  When a storage capacity crisis is looming administrators receive instant notification both of the impending issue and that SafeCapacity has begun following its policy to automatically correct the problem by overflowing seldom used files to secondary storage pools without any human intervention.

Ease of scaling - SafeCapacity automatically scales to any size file system environment and facilitates the expansion of user's storage facilities without unnecessary downtime.

Support for all storage architectures - Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), SCSI over IP (iSCSI) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS).

Solution-Soft invites you to test-drive SafeCapacity today. Free evaluations are available through our sales group.

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