Nampak Liquid is the first company in South Africa to control its countrywide storage resources from a single Web-based console with HighGround`s Storage Resource Manager (SRM), supplied by NT tools distributor, Server Tools.
Nampak is South Africa`s dominant packaging manufacturer and the largest on the African continent. It is also the second largest packaging company in the southern hemisphere.
SRM is a capacity, consumption and availability management solution for Windows NT enterprise storage. It provides network-wide reports, trends, and policies and a centralised Web management console which assists organisations in eliminating storage-related downtime and productivity losses. It assists companies in ensuring data and application availability, reduces unnecessary IT spending and increase the efficiency of IT staff operations.
Nampak Liquid has implemented a quota system on its 12 NT servers situated at its branches countrywide. "This means that users are only allowed to use a certain amount of disk space, depending on their user profile," says Robert Boccia, divisional IT manager for Nampak Liquid.
"The benefit of SRM is that it is controlled from a central server which gathers information from software agents installed on the other servers. It monitors the storage usage on all servers and will e-mail the user and administrator if a user exceeds their allotted quota. It does not prevent the user from using more than their quota, allowing them to continue working until the situation is resolved."
Boccia says the installation of SRM was simple and hassle-free, and that SRM has no effect on the normal flow of data through the company`s network. The product can be set to run system scans only in off-peak times if necessary, to further reduce the chance of causing bottlenecks. The system will also alert the IT department if certain trigger conditions are reached, allowing them to proactively manage the company`s RAID-5 storage systems before emergencies occur.
All scanned data is correlated in a SQL Server database, providing out-of-the-box Web reports, historical trends and policies that enable easy problem detection and correction. Administrators can also follow each users usage patterns on each system, even drilling down to each user`s storage on specific partitions.
SRM provides the following features:
Reports and alerts on storage stress points and vulnerability gaps to proactively prevent storage-related downtime and productivity losses
Builds statistical maps of enterprise storage topology to ensure full utilisation of, and optimum return on existing storage resource investments
Generates historical trends for all storage resources to enable accurate planning for growth
Identifies unused capacity and resources that can be recycled to eliminate unnecessary storage purchases
Provides individual instance drill-down on all storage resources for fast problem correction
Detects changes in storage topology to ensure complete resource protection
Share
Editorial contacts