“When it comes to storage, we fight for every GB of data. Aprigo NINJA enables us to extend the life of our storage infrastructure and push out expensive upgrades.”

- Phillip Woosley, IT Manager, Manufacturing Company

Aprigo’s Capacity Management Tools For IT Storage Planning
Capacity management (also known as demand management) is simple in theory, but difficult to do. When you break it down, it consists of two distinct parts:

1. Understanding what you have – Reporting on current usage and trends
2. Figuring out what you’ll need – Forecasting for optimal storage capacity based on current storage usage, projected growth, and planned projects

Understanding What You Have

The first step in any IT storage planning initiative is to understand your current usage. This includes:

• Storage usage by users – Which individuals are taking up the most space?
• Storage usage by groups – How are the different business units consuming storage?
• File Age By Individuals and Groups – How old are the files created by and used by individuals and groups? Can they be moved to archive?

Once you understand your current storage usage, you can be proactive and start looking toward future storage planning.

Figuring Out What You’ll Need

To make the shift toward future storage planning, you’ll need to:

• Keep track of historical information and data trends – How are your storage needs evolving over time?
• Forecast your projected data growth – Estimating how much your data will grow over time will help to understand future storage needs.
• Include planned projects – If there are planned IT initiatives that will require additional storage resources, they must be accounted for in your capacity planning.

Armed with a well-researched understanding of your current and projected storage needs, you’ll be able to develop a comprehensive capacity planning strategy.

Getting The Data

While all of this may sound good in theory, you still have to get the usage data. To do this, you’ll need a capacity management tool.

Existing capacity management tools fall into two categories:

1. Enterprise capacity planning software – These are the 6-figure storage capacity management applications that require massive infrastructure changes along with increased hardware, software, and manpower needs. And when you’re trying to get the most out of your storage, using software that requires more storage and infrastructure needs doesn’t solve the problem…it makes it worse.
2. Basic capacity planning tools – These tools are the low-end of the capacity management spectrum, giving just a basic look at storage usage.

The Aprigo Capacity Management Solution

Our Capacity Management and planning solutions cover both phases of the capacity management process.

Aprigo NINJA – Aprigo NINJA is the first release in our suite of SaaS-based IT Management Essentials. NINJA’S features help IT pros understand current usage showing:

• File Types By Size – See which files are taking up the most space on your network, allowing you to plan storage tiering and understand growth rates
• Ownership – See how individuals and groups are consuming storage by size and by file types
• Modification Time – With our Last Modification Time view, you’ll be able to see files that can be moved from primary storage to an archive, allowing you to set proper retention and archiving policies
• Collective Intelligence – Aprigo’s industry-first collective intelligence engine lets you compare your capacity usage to others, looking at their live IT environments.

SaaS Data Management

Unlike other, traditional file resource management applications, Aprigo NINJA’s SaaS Meta-data based architecture requires no changes to existing infrastructure or processes, no DBs or agents, delivers immediate value without the hassle of a long engagement cycle and makes it easy to manage multiple remote sites. Get Aprigo NINJA Free today!