W. Quinn Shows Whats In Store For Smaller Networks

Spacemaxx storage resource Management software extends the reach of W. Quinn Associates Inc.s storage management products beyond servers to desktops, NAS devices and storage area networks.

Considering the staggering growth of storage usage over the past few years, there are surprisingly few companies creating tools that can be used to monitor storage. eWeek Labs believes this will be an important market to watch in the near future because a lot of companies will likely start to use these products, especially as budgets tighten. Just a few months ago, technology powerhouse Sun Microsystems Inc. purchased W. Quinns largest competitor, HighGround Systems Inc.

Unlike W. Quinns enterprise-class StorageCentral storage management suite, SpaceMaxx SRM 1.0, released in December, is targeted at small to midsize companies and lacks the formers proactive disk quota enforcement capabilities.

The products also differ in price: SpaceMaxx SRM 1.0 costs $149 per server and $29 per workstation, whereas StorageCentral lists for $849 per server.

Who needs it?

IT managers who want proactive storage management, such as disk quota enforcement and file blocking to prevent users from storing extraneous files like MP3s on corporate systems, should spend the extra money on StorageCentral because it will spare them the tedious task of deleting files.

IT managers who just want to monitor storage usage should stick with SpaceMaxx.

Although SpaceMaxx can speak to non-Windows-based storage devices such as NAS (network-attached storage) boxes, the products administration utility cannot be run on a Unix server.

SpaceMaxxs excellent and easy-to-use reporting tools are similar to those found in StorageCentral. In tests, we easily created and ran useful reports to track which users were abusing storage resources on a network. We could also produce monthly and weekly usage reports to track data growth—an important metric that helps IT managers plan future hardware acquisitions.

IT managers who dont want to create their own report scripts can use the custom-built best-practices reports included with SpaceMaxx. These reports are useful for finding things such as large duplicate files and large files that are stale (havent been accessed for a long time) and should be archived.

The SpaceMaxx SRM Disk Cleanup Wizard, which can be launched from a central console, empties the Recycle Bin and the Temp directories of the operating system and Web browser to reclaim storage space.

SpaceMaxx also has a scheduling utility to automatically run storage monitoring reports and e-mail reports to administrators via SMTP.