Northern Storage Suite for EMC delivers flexible, scalable and high performance content quota management for Celerra environments:
Quotas on User Accounts
Control usage by user account; within project or shared department folders.
File Blocking Quotas
Prevent users from saving specific file types - stop them hiding mp3 collections in their user shares. Non-intrusive extension scanning ensures zero system lag.
High Performance NAS Quotas
Specifically affecting real-time functionality [storage quotas and file blocking quotas], Northern Storage Suite maintains a fast access list of file and path sizes in memory. When a change occurs, instead of rescanning the entire quota path Northern Storage Suite simply retrieves the new size of the individual file and compares this to the known size, increasing quota usage by the difference - reduced scanning, reduced network traffic and reduced Disk I/O.
This list, or file cache, is populated and updated as files are used - Northern Storage Suite always remembers the most active files in the environment. Also, the size of this cache is set at a maximum of 400,000 files per volume [56MB per volume] and can be edited through the registry.
Hybrid quotas
The majority of file-system activity takes place well under quota thresholds. Hybrid quotas make use of this fact to focus system resources only where they are needed. Quota targets are monitored passively, guaranteeing zero impact on day-to-day file system activity and maximizing performance. When a target passes a locking threshold its priority rating is immediately increased; the object is locked and it is added to a high-priority monitoring list to guarantee immediate unlocking when usage decreases.
Without this hybrid architecture all file system activity would be delayed while quota objects are scanned and policies are checked. With the architecture, activity is only delayed long enough to check an internal list of locked objects - no scanning is required whatsoever.
A Windows host should be designated as the managing host for the datamover[s] involved in the deployment. There are specific operating system requirements for the Celerra and as with generic CIFS compliant NAS devices Northern Storage Suite requires that the paths it will be managing are configured with pure CIFS or mixed CIFS/NFS security protocol support. NFS data cannot be managed.
The specific hardware and operating system requirements for management of Celerra environments are detailed below:
FOR MANAGING HOSTS:
Hardware: 600-megahertz Pentium III-compatible or faster
512 megabytes of RAM
80 megabytes of free disk space
Server OS: Windows 2000 Servers or later [excluding Data Center editions]
Client OS: Windows XP Professional
Windows 2000 Professional
Windows 2000 Servers or later [excluding Data Center editions]
Internet Explorer 5.1 SP2 or later
Database: MS SQL 2000 SP2 or later
MSDE 2000 or later [evaluation only]
FOR EMC CELERRA:
Operating System: Celerra 5.6 or later
Configuration: CEE Framework loaded with CEPA Services running
CIFS service configured
CIFS or CIFS/NFS protocol support on managed paths
Management of 'NFS only' shares is not supported