Northern Storage Suite offers advanced support for EMC Celerra NAS devices.

The Big Picture

• Enable quota management: Implementing a quota management solution will result in more effective storage management and utilisation, reducing costs and improving efficiencies.
• Control vulnerable content: File blocking and binary-level reporting prevents unwanted files from being stored and identify hidden and pre-existing content.
• Encourage efficient usage: Make users more aware of usage policies and better able to comply; make efficient use a part of business culture.
• Identify and remove unwanted data: Meta-data-sensitive tools identify and remove unwanted data, reducing computer resources by an average of 30 percent thus maximizing data storage.
• Automate reporting: Providing regular, automated status reporting eliminates the need for time-consuming and resource-intensive information searching.
• Reduce cost and administrative overhead: Achieve effective capacity planning by reclaiming wasted capacity, optimizing server storage and understanding and controlling user behaviour.

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: