There’s a story I’ve heard told more than once: it’s the story of a man who lived across the street from a friend. Every day, this man would roll out a beautiful, vintage Rambler, every surface gleaming, white-walls and all.
Well, the thing of it is, every day he would roll out the car, but not to take it for a cruise. He would pull it out of the garage and into the driveway. There, he’d lovingly wash and wax it. And not just a quick rinse, this guy would spend an hour and a half, every single day, just washing a car he never used. Can you imagine?
There are a lot of ways that you can improve your future and make your job easier. As a storage administrator, you’re probably thinking about tiered storage. So what’s the big deal with it? Tiered storage is about reducing overhead, thereby reducing operational expenses. However, it’s not as easy as dropping another rack of storage in your environment: you need a way to get files to and from their appropriate places.
Tiering done well means that you aren’t repeatedly wasting backup cycles on old, unchanged files. Also, that when an end user is looking for an old file, they can get it easily, and without calling the IT Help Desk. So the only thing standing between you and reduced expenses next year is having the right software component in your storage environment to manage what goes where and how it is returned to an end user.
This is the opportunity you’re being given with your end of year budget: you can set yourself up now for huge savings next year, freeing budget dollars for the things you want. How much easier would your life be if you had tiered storage? How much lower would your overheads be if you didn’t have to back-up your stale files?
You want a smooth, seamless transition. You want safety and reassurance. And you can have them, with DefendX Software VFM ™.
What is it? Put simply, DefendX Software VFM is a policy based file movement system with a searchable catalog of all of your tiered files. It finds and moves the appropriate files to secondary storage and replaces them with stubs (or not, as your policy dictates). It creates an entry in the catalog with all of the file’s extended metadata--not just file name, but security permissions, when and where the file was moved from and to, who the original file owner was, and more. And when it’s time to bring the file back to an end user, it grabs the file and presents it.
Learn more about what NTP Software VFM can do for you by downloading the data sheet.
