Cheap and efficient approach to disk space management

Currently, all administrative work on the keeping and monitoring of storage database is automated. Benefit all of us live in the 21 century and we have a wide range of software products of management disk space.

But despite the great advances in storage and database management (ongoing monitoring and verification, and regular graphic reports of the fullness file servers based on various parameters of information: volume, origin, type, age, etc), control of large volumes of information remains a very serious problem. Of course you can find a lot of decisions; but either it too primitive or too expensive.

Many software management for disk quotas, especially from the low price range, based on the method of periodic scanning of occupancy of file storage. Notably, the shortcoming of monitoring is the post-factum, and you should make the subsequent manual fixes for analysis of the state and unblocking resources once such user exceeds quota limit.

On the other hand, every physical device have capacity limits, but we don't need to keep in mind an advanced techniques to work with it. So, the best way to manage disk quotas is likely to physical disks capacity, but for every folder individually, and with power of existing analysis methods and tools.

However, the really efficient approach to disk space management is based on real-time methods, which allows manage storage capacity like hardware, but with all benefits like notifications / alerts, rich analysis tools, and more. And of course it will be nice to be cheap.

Technically, to manage limits in real time, it's need to help Windows core manage quotas; this is central point of any real-time file activity. And this is alone point where any file operation can be stopped before data stored on disk. Fortunately, Windows (since 2003 R2) has an support of folder quotas in the box; so for simple cases there already exists solution. But what to do if there is a need for additional features based upon the same manner like blocked extensions or special cases of integration with 3rd party tools?

First, let's describe the basic features we really need:

* Of course, real-time management.
* Big set of hardware and software options supported, like virtual drives, RAID arrays, network attached storages, and many other hardware solutions.
* Clusters and distributed file systems support.
* Rich set of notable alerts to help users and administrators find folders with too small or too big quotas.
* Analytic.
* Scripting support. Actually, this is really important option if we need to make bulk operations with quotas.
* Rich possibilities to integrate with 3rd party software. Including wide range of backup/restore tools, archiving tools, and other.
* Possibility of administrator's to involve such file operations in user quotas.
* Abilities to manage file contents. For example, such server logs ain't necessary to be involved to user accounts.
* Make users life harder if they decide to use server resources to collect non-permitted content (like multimedia).
* Complete integration with our Active Directory.
* And of course ability to run storage fully automated: let users solve problems if quotas are full.

Fortunately, we found an solution that realizes all our options, and provides much more. This is WinQuota (http://www.winquota.com). It has all options we need, and has other ones like web based management support (additionally to usual one).

I've tried to use WinQuota, and I see this tool is really interesting. It works exactly as I need - real time and automated, without administrator's intervention. By specifying hard quota limit, I worked in the same manner as for hard disk capacity limit: it can't be exceeded simply. On the other hand, soft limit is useful to set alerts.

Usage is pretty simple - adding limits and notifications is user friendly.

Unfortunately, WinQuota provides only samples of notifications, without auto-detecting it from AD or Outlook. So, you need to use template from WinQuota installation to specify your email server and login/password, to let WinQuota send emails.

Resume: 4/5 stars. Notifications are subject to be more friendly. Except this, tool is pretty good.