After I added links to the Dfs root object, I could select a linked share object (under the Dfs root object) to display or edit that share's status and the physical resource that the share represented. As Figure 1 shows, StorageX displays these statistics in the interface's right-hand pane.
As I selected shares to add to the Dfs root object, StorageX automatically created corresponding server objects (for the servers on which the selected shares resided) under the Physical View\Namespace Resources folder, which Figure 2, page 39, shows. I continued to add servers and shares to the Dfs root until I had configured four servers and 100 shares.
At this point, I performed a quick test of the product's basic data-migration capability. To do so, I right-clicked a folder from one of the configured servers under the Physical View\Namespace Resources object. I used the context menu's Data Migration option to create a new folder on a second server and move the original folder's contents to the new folder. I then used a client computer to access the data. As far as the client was concerned, the data resided where it always had.
Power Through Policies
Next, I turned my attention to the Admin View object, which holds the product's policy objects. StorageX provides six core management and automation policies that you can customize. I tested the Disaster Recovery, Home Folder, Namespace Availability, and Replication Manager policies. The two remaining policies—SnapMirror and UNIX Namespace—required hardware I didn't have (i.e., a NetApp filer and a UNIX server, respectively).
To test the Disaster Recovery policy, I configured two servers with similar amounts of storage, making one server the primary member of the Dfs root. I configured the second server as a target for the policy, which copied the primary server's contents to the secondary server and made that server the target in the event of a necessary failover. To simplify the testing, I manually copied about 80 percent of the data from the primary server to the secondary server before I started the Disaster Recovery policy, which moves data according to a schedule that you set.
I set the policy to begin moving data, let it update the secondary server with the remaining data, then disconnected the primary server from the network. With no noticeable difference, my network client could still access the shared files that the backup server was now serving.
The Home Folder policy is designed to simplify the creation of users' home directories. I pointed the policy at my network's domain controller (DC), and the policy created home directories for all user accounts that didn't already have them. The process was simple and straightforward and worked as I expected.
The Namespace Availability policy let me synchronize two Dfs roots, providing the redundancy necessary for a fail-safe environment. I used the policy's default settings, which configure the Dfs roots to synchronize every 12 hours. I then intentionally took servers offline and had no problem getting failover to work.
To test the Replication Manager policy, I set up a specific pair of shares by copying 30GB of data from one data drive to a fresh drive on another server. I let the copying process run overnight to establish the test conditions, then added 100MB of data to the primary drive and modified approximately 150 files. After the policy processed the data, I confirmed that the two drives' contents were identical.
Reporting Features
Last, I evaluated StorageX's report-generation features. The application can generate several short reports on the fly, and here I discovered another bug. Some of the drives I used for testing connected to my computers through either USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 connections. Although StorageX worked correctly with those drives' contents, the application couldn't enumerate the drives' capacity properties and thus couldn't report those properties, as Figure 3 shows. The vendor assured me that it would fix this problem; the problem might even be resolved by the time you read this.
I uncovered one other problem when I attempted to generate a report of all the user permissions on all the shares that StorageX was managing. Even for my relatively small test network, this report took nearly 15 minutes to generate. If I'd been working with a large enterprise, I might still be waiting for the report to finish.
A Defining Product
All in all, my tests barely challenged the capabilities of StorageX. This category-defining storage-management product builds on familiar Windows technologies and metaphors to make storage management a one-administrator task, regardless of your environment's size.
