HP Storage Essentials V5.00.01 for File Servers guide (T4283-96016, January 2006)

Storage Essentials 5.00.01 for File Servers Guide 1
1 Overview of File System Viewer
Your business is only as good as your storage infrastructure. You depend on data for the core
functions of your business. The growth of your business or just maintaining day-to-day business
activities adds even more data. The challenge is in knowing if your file storage infrastructure is
growing in a managed, organized and efficient manner. Given the sheer volumes of data,
obtaining this sort of information can be difficult.
With the industry’s most versatile multi-threaded scanner which creates an information store about
your storage system, the management software for file systems has been designed to scale to the
needs of enterprise file systems.
Also, by combining file, logical and physical storage resource monitoring and reporting with active
SAN management, this software provides a single integrated system for managing your entire file
storage infrastructure.
It provides detailed analysis of your file storage in four key areas:
• Composition – Aging
• Why are there files on a system that have not been accessed for more than six months?
• Do we need hierarchical storage management or a store and delete policy?
• Content – Extensions
• Are file systems being used properly?
• Is there misuse of storage space?
• If it is, then who are the offenders?
• Consumer - Users, Groups, Applications
• Who is using how much space?
• Is the usage planned?
• Capacity - Used and Available
• What is the total available capacity?
• How much is being used?
File System Viewer does a recursive lookup on the file system and stores the information in an
embedded database. File System Viewer can scan files very quickly for several reasons because File
System Viewer never opens the files and it uses a multi-threaded process. More than one process
can be used at a time to scan the files.
Keep in mind the following:
• If you do not see information for the file server, verify the collector for the file server is running.
You can verify the collector is running by clicking Reports > Storage Essentials > Data
Collection > File SRM Data in HP Systems Insight Manager or . On the Data Collection tab,
look in the Running? column. See the topic, “Managing Collectors for File System Viewer“in the
User Guide for more information.
• Avoid scanning the /xfn directory on Solaris. File System Viewer does not detect the /xfn
directory in the directory listing for the root file systems on Solaris hosts.