How do you keep user home directories (on NAS) from consuming all available storage space.
If your user home directories are on the network storage, do you have policies in places to keep them from consuming all available space, for instance
- deleting files older than 1 year
- designated special folder for files to keep, all other are deleted after certain period
- quote for every account irregardless
I am mostly interested in simple rules for end user to follow, while those rules can be implemented in software or OS.
Thank you for sharing.
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
May 25, 2010 4:45 PM
UPDATED:
May 26, 2010 3:51 AM
Answer Wiki:
In one of the environments I consulted in, I had recommened and they agreed with implementing a disk quota solution across their environment which included a NAS appliance used for home folders.
The software solution was from Northern.
Here's a link to the solution which includes Disk Quota:
http://www.northern.net/en/Storage-Management/Introduction/
Disk Quota section: http://www.northern.net/en/Storage-Management/Disk-Quotas/
Screenshot: http://www.northern.net/Global/Screenshots/NQS_grid_big.gif
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This question was asked on LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/9mZ83X
In my experience it can be very difficult to get the buy-in from the user community to follow any procedures that will mean more work for them. Using quotas as already suggested is one way to approach this.
Another approach is to use a charge back system so that the users know that there is some value behind the storage they are using. Most users version of storage costs is what they see in the commodity stores ( 1TB drive for $100 ). They dont understand all the other costs involved in backups, admin and redundancy. After the business units actually pay for the storage they use can be one way maybe by moving the cost of the storage they use from their budget into the IT budget.
Depending if the NAS appliance you have supports some kind of migration API you may be to use an HSM product to put the files that have not been used for a long time to tape.
And yet another option (though costly) is to use a File Visualization product such as EMC’s RainFinity, F5 ARX or Bluearc that can sit between your user and the NAS appliance and use file policies to move, copy,delete files around based on some criteria whilst the user still sees the files as being in the same directory.