Plan for the Future

Accurate forecasts – accurate investments

An estimated 1.6 million terabytes of data were created during 2006, and the number will increase each year. The accelerating growth of stored data is an accepted fact within our industry – it’s a future for which we all need to plan pro-actively. But all too often storage investments are made with little or no information which results in short-lived emergency solutions or overly complex, redundant solutions.

Decisions about future storage needs demand accurate forecasts based on efficient usage. Hardware should be cleaned up, usage should be controlled, and trends should be identified – only then can you plan with an understanding of how much storage you will really need in the future.

Northern Storage Suite offers all of the functionality needed to establish an acceptable trend, as well as offering the crucial forecasts themselves. Forecasts can be made at host and path levels, they can be based on users, user groups, storage quotas and mailboxes. They can also be financial or budget forecasts connecting actual costs to real storage use.

ACHIEVING THE GOAL

1. Establish acceptable usage
By identifying current usage trends you can establish what reasonable storage should be in your organization. This can be done by using Storage Reporter, where you can view usage by file type group and individual file type, or usage by user.

2. Usage Projections
Storage Reporter offers projections for usage, file types, user levels and also forecasts 'full-dates' for when hosts or paths will reach their storage limit.

3. Cost analysis & projections
Storage Chargeback shows the costs that will be incurred if the current usage trends continues through the coming budget year. You can invoice or report according to storage use, quota size, mailbox size. You can bill individuals or whole departments, or you can just send reports, both at user level and group level. The cost system can be based on multi-tiered billing classes,or specific storage devices.