NAS Analysis and capacity Tracking software recommendations

**Phyrelight** · 10-25-13, 04:49 PM

I am looking for recommendations for a software that will fill the following needs

Analyze a network NAS path that I provide and return

Capacity/utilization
Breakdown of data by type/department/folder
filter data by last usage would be nice

Here is the situation, we have a Hodge podge excel and scripts that is probably more that 10 years old that goes out and pulls current capacity and a task running on our system runs twice a week and dumps the data into the excel sheet. We run another sheet to pull that data and display on a graph of all 5 of our supported areas as a report. When they reach 80% they go red on the report and we recommend they buy more space or clean out old files.

I would like to simplify things since our department lost its last systems analyst that maintained the excel scripts.

Can anyone think of a software package that can do this? I have no problem paying for licensing. I researched a few online and they were enterprise level software suites that require a server environment to run. I want to install it on my work desktop and when needed check the status of the drives and complete reports. The one feature I would love that we lack now is the ability to search by age of document. We have a documented retention policy and if I can tell the documents that exceed that i can save a lot of money on storage by purging old data.

**DJ Ms. White** · 10-25-13, 05:01 PM

I was about to go ask the IT guys at my school, but then I remembered that everything at Tech is tied around a backbone written in the early 80s.

**Phyrelight** · 10-25-13, 05:09 PM

Yea that is what we have here. I can't go to the actual storage guys and ask for these reports.. The band-aid approach of the excel files and script calls has worked for years but its been edited and handed around so many times now it really needs to either be redone from scratch or a software solution needs to be found. We lost our last system admin 2 months ago and they stripped down his position and pay-line to entry level so the odds of me finding anyone decent at AD and scripting is unlikely and I am too damn busy with projects to keep up with it. We handed it off to a non scripting person on the tech staff and found the last 2 months worth of data non usable because he failed to verify his date time format before dumping the data to the excel document. Anyway.....

**DJ Ms. White** · 10-25-13, 05:33 PM

God that sounds horrible. Our backbone forces all advising to be done from the command line.

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**Phyrelight** · 10-25-13, 05:52 PM

they have come a long way actually. We need to upgrade every server on campus except exchange if we want to upgrade to windows 8. They poured a lot of money into infrastructure in the last few years and those upgrades are finally coming online. Campus wide SCCM2012 for example. I just sent a request off to the storage team to find out what would be needed to generate the information I need in monthly format, guess i will wait and see what they say. I think they have the ability to generate the reports its just a reluctance to offer the service. Our oldest living application is advantage (finance) which is a 16bit and will only run in 32bit windows 7 in compatibly mode. Up until 2 years ago we still had command line for data warehouse

**WileECyte** · 10-25-13, 06:17 PM

Something like this would likely be right up your alley:

FolderSizes - Disk Space Analysis Software for Windows

**Phyrelight** · 10-25-13, 10:13 PM

thanks Wile, I will give that demo a try on Monday!

**WileECyte** · 10-25-13, 10:55 PM

Looks pretty nifty. We do all our disk capacity tracking via our SAN backend, so our storage team can provide us with who is using how much and where.