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Online Storage Mgmt Tools

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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.

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Xdrive has an appealing

interface , which not only looks cool, but is also quite simple to be used.

One can chose from the Xdrive, Xdrive desktop and Xdrive desktop Lite

options while using this site for online storage

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

To configure SAN Health

Diagnostic Capture, click on the 'new' button on the interface and then

click on the 'Site details' tab at the bottom
Provide the details, which will

act as a title to the generated report. Click on 'Report return' tab and

provide the email address where you want the tool to return the reports
Click on the 'SAN details' tab

and fill in the details. These details will act as a title to SAN health

report which you will be getting through email
Enter the switch or EFCM server

IP address and login credentials to add the fabric to your audit set where

the EFCM server is Brocades storage management server
Go to the 'Start audit' tab,

click on 'Preflight Check' button and if entered details are correct, Start

audit button gets enabled. Finally, an encrypted data file with .BSH

extension gets generated
Upload the .BSH data file and

this tool will generate a detailed report. One can upload two files in this

appliance simultaneously and also compare changes

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.

This free tool can be used to

accumulate storage metrics of your servers and provides you statistics about

storage consumed on them

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/Stor age-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.

Sandeep Koul

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