Online Storage Mgmt Tools

Online
Storage Mgmt Tools

Online storage has been widely accepted as a disaster-resistant solution.
Here, is a discussion of some of the best online storage sites and utilities to
help you manage your data

Apart of the total IT budget of an organization is
reserved for data storage and management; and using this budget effectively is
one of the challenging tasks. There are several innovations in the recent past
which have made data management simpler and also disaster-resistant. One such
innovation is online storage management sites and tools. Online storage as the
name suggests stores data online, thus making it reachable anytime, anywhere. By
using online storage not only can you store data but also share and manage it.
There are a number of sites which offer online storage space, and there are a
few which even offer advanced features such as Content management.

Here, we will be disscussing such sites and tools. Most sites provide free
sign up and a fixed amount of storage space, which could be extended by paying.

By simultaneously using these websites one can store large amount of data
free of cost.

1800edrive
This site provides its users with 25 GB of storage space
and once configured, you can use it like a logical drive, which you create on
your network or you can simply access the website and store as well as read your
data there. Once you have configured 1800edrive as a logical drive, you can
simply drag and drop data to it. The 1800edrive provides encrypted data transfer
and works transparently with Windows browser. Not only does this site provide
online storage space, but it also lets its users manage that space. On top of
that it let you create content in different formats like html, xml, txt and
more.

Configuring 1800edrive onto your desktop is quite simple; just go to the
website and sign up using your email address. After filling up a few personal
details you will receive an email confirmation providing a link to activate your
account. Once your account gets activated, you can use all the features
including network drive creation.

MediaMax
This provides an online storage space of 25 GB, and is
powered by Streamloader. It provides its users with a secure place to store,
access and share personal content. The content could be anything ranging from
movies, videos to photographs.

Interestingly, even those who don’t have a MediaMax account can upload large
files to MediaMax, but they can’t host their content on the sites which
authorized users can.

For free backup and synchronization of their content one can download
MediaMax XL beta software, and then further by using the MediaMax file manager,
you can organize, download, play, share or host your files.

Xdrive
With this online storage site one can store and share 5 GB
of content. Signing up is easy; all you need is an AOL account. One can use
Xdrive as Xdrive Classic, Xdrive Desktop Lite and Xdrive desktop. Xdrive classic
provides a Web interface to manage your account. The Xdrive Desktop Lite is a
light weight desktop application for managing content. Xdrive Desktop can be
used for backup, drag and drop and content management onto your computer.

The interface provided by Xdrive is the most appealing amongst all five that
we have discussed here.

4share
4share provides users with a free storage space of 5 GB.
Just provide your email address and you immediately get a free account. The key
feature of this site is Windows-based interface which is simple to use, and
there is even anti-virus support and password protection for folders.

Diino
This online storage site provides 2 GB of free storage space.
Diino doesn’t have a browser- based Web interface; so for using this application
first you have to download it onto your computer. The interface of this
application has a Diino player integrated in it, and email management, blog
facility and backup features are also there.

One can even access Diino through a mobile phone. It provides a lot of
flexibility to the user. With Diino, apart from the free plan there are paid
plans that you can choose from as per your needs.

Storage Management Tools
With about 120 percent increase in
capacity of disks annually and drop in per megabyte storage costs the obvious
costs of managing storage should have declined, but in reality most
organizations are spending more on storage devices every year. The reason is the
ever increasing data and lack of proper management tools. After discussing the
free online storage sites, now we will throw some light on a few storage
management tools which will help organizations to cope with the challenges of
storage management.

Brocade SAN Health Diagnostics Capture
Managing a SAN is one of the
greatest challenges faced by organizations. Brocade SAN Health Diagnostic
Capture is a free utility that can be used to monitor the SAN’s health. This
utility can be downloaded from www.brocade.com/support/sanhealthdownload.jspX

Key features
This tool will automatically discover, analyze and
report important aspects of your SAN including switch topology and performance
details. The results are presented in standard Excel and Visio format.

Installation
The basic system requirements for installing this
utility onto your desktop includes: Intel Pentium processor 133 MHz or higher,
Microsoft Windows 95 or higher, and 64 MB RAM / 10 MB available hard disk
space.

Download this utility from the above mentioned URL, open the zipped file and
then run InstallSANHealthDiagnosticsCapture.exe. This will install the
application on your system. The basic configuration steps of the tool are
mentioned in the screen shots 1-6.

There is one more tool known as SAN Health Professional provided by Brocade
which is available free of cost and can be used for analyzing SAN data captured
by the SAN Health Diagnostics Capture tool.

SAN Health Professional
One can download this utility from
www.brocade.com/support/sanhealth prodownload.jsp. This application is used for
analyzing complete data captured by capture tool and is important in change
management.

Installation
The basic system requirements for installing this
utility remains the same as above, with the only exception that it works only on
Microsoft Windows 2000 or higher versions. Refer to figure 6 to know how to use
this.

Storage Assessment Tool
One major challenge in the storage
management is the unused data residing over the storage space. As price
associated with storage hardware is high and lots of resources are wasted in
managing unused data, overcoming this issue is critical for any
organization.

Storage Assessment Tool is a free and easy to use software to accumulate and
report storage metrics of servers thus providing a report that can be used in
storage management. This tool from Quest software can be downloaded from www.quest.com/Storage-Assessment-Tool/,
and can be used for free for 60 days.

Key features
This tool is easy to install and run. It provides
various kinds of reports that can be used in load balancing exercises, handling
server lease expirations and deployment of new storage devices on network. With
the help of this tool one can easily reduce physical server count.

One of the key feature of this tool is the identification of files which are
taking up disk space i.e. .avi, .mpeg, and then these files can be easily
removed

Using it, one can scan up to 50 unique computers on the network and get an
idea about money which could be saved if disks are cleaned up. Several reports
which one can get using this includes Enterprise Storage statistics Reports,
Enterprise Storage Recovery Reports, Potential Conflicts Reports and Data
Migration Challenge Reports. The Enterprise Storage Recovery reports give an
idea about the storage space that can be saved if all unused and duplicate data
is removed.

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