Symantec Makes Storage Consumers Accountable with Chargeback Tool

Symantec on Dec. 15 came out with a new enterprise storage monitoring tool designed to help identify enterprise employees who may be misusing corporate storage.

By providing more visibility and control into the ownership and usage of unstructured data, Symantec Data Insight for Storage aims to better manage the multiplication of documents, spreadsheets, photos and e-mails, among others. The information also can be used to help project storage capacity needs in the future.

Using a new chargeback process, Data Insight for Storage makes storage consumers accountable for what they bring into enterprise coffers. For example, storage admins now will be able to connect specific people with unnecessary files and other data that take up valuable storage space.

For example, if employees are downloading music, video and personal photos into a corporate storage location, IT will be apprised and have an audit trail for management to do something about it.

Researcher IDC projects that the amount of storage capacity shipped in support of file-based storage is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent from now through 2013. Identifying ownership of this data, understanding its usage and managing data consumption become increasingly difficult under this avalanche of incoming business and personal data.

Data Insight for Storage aims to solve these issues with its chargeback feature, which links each stored file with its storer. The software enables IT managers to see who created, who utilizes and who is responsible for data. Individual users can be mapped to a department or line of business for consumption reports or chargeback.

This allows for improved efficiencies in storage deployments by giving IT the ability to hold business units accountable for the space they utilize, Symantec said.

Using this data owner identification process, orphan and/or dormant data can be located and organized. It creates candidates for reclamation, archiving or deletion processes.
 
Finally, Data Insight for Storage allows IT managers to make better strategic reclamation, migration, tiering and capacity planning decisions.

Data Insight for Storage is available now, with pricing starting at $676 per terabyte. Multiple pricing models are available.