The FusionStorm File System Assessment (FSA) provides a fully documented picture into the world of your file systems. With the proliferation of stale data across file systems today and the strong push to archive data, having hard evidence of your data profile makes a lot of sense.

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THE CUTTING EDGE OF INFORMATION INTELLIGENCE
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One of today’s biggest initiatives in datacenters is archiving to improve backup times and the costs associated with backing up data. Clearly defining the data that can be archived is often a very cumbersome and manual task that IT administrators do not have bandwidth for in their day to day activities. Gathering empirical data on exactly what the archive data in your organization looks like can be a burden to daily operations and procedures. FusionStorm takes the guess work out of designing an effective archive strategy.

Many organizations struggle with data growth in their file systems. The common solution is simply to add more storage or another server to the environment. This creates a level of complexity and cost associated with management, backup and hardware maintenance. More importantly, most of the file data (more than 70% in most cases) is rarely if ever accessed after the first few months.

How does one design an effective archive strategy?
Once files are deemed stale the data should be archived based on company defined polices to free up tier one file server space. Archiving can be achieved simply by using one of many HSM tools that are widely available in the market today. Business defined polices will then allow a seamless move of data from one tier to another, unbeknownst to the end user.

The use of stubbing technology leaves the files where the users know where to find them. An online archive makes sense in a world where you don’t know when data will become relevant again.

Without an effective archiving strategy the same unchanged and un-accessed files are often backed up countless times on weekly, monthly and even a daily basis. These backups are then sent offsite for disaster recovery purposes. The same files are usually backed up countless times and sent offsite for long term retention.

More times than not moving this data from the backup stream can effectively lower your backup times, free up costly tier one disk space, consolidate server proliferation, decrease offsite tape costs and lower hardware maintenance.

Fusionstorm utilizes a non-intrusive agent-less software that collects meta-data on your production file systems. This data is commonly collected in a few hours with literally zero impact to the systems it queries.

Once the data has been collected the FusionStorm team compiles the data in order to create a comprehensive report that is specific to your environment.

Included in the assessment are the following deliverables:
• The age of the file system data by access data and modified date. These two pieces of data are critical to determine the best possible archival policies for your environment

• Department and personnel level detail on the types of files and the quantity being stored

• How much duplicate data exists in the environment at the file level

• File system growth usage reports including forecasted future growth based on current metrics

• The FSA results are provided back to the client in a concise and user friendly format