Solarwind Manager

In an enterprise situation, making sure you have the right solution to manage and check your storage set-up is critical. While some software products are convoluted and confusing, SolarWinds has developed a product that aims not only to provide a robust set of features to the professional user, but to do so with a relatively easy set-up and intuitive interface.


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We had a chance to use SolarWinds Storage Manager, and after just a few minutes of use it was great to see such a huge range of features available to the user. Out-of-the-box Storage Manager supports a large range of the most popular NAS/SAN arrays, along with several network switches and operating systems including those that are virtualized; if your solution isn't on the list you can still install an STM Agent to report data to the Storage Manager server.

Once you've installed the software, which is easy thanks to detailed documentation, you can access the front-end through a simple web interface. From here the sidebar presents you with all the different things SolarWinds Storage Manager can do, such as give detailed usage reports, storage readouts from NAS groups, monitor array errors and many more.
The Event Monitor is one of the great features of Storage Manager: after you set certain rules that monitor the health of your drives (or use the in-built ones), any time your rules or thresholds are exceeded an event will be recorded with an appropriate course of action. This allows you to easily and quickly respond to any errors or warnings that may affect the performance of your drive.

Along with the Event Monitor you also get detailed information about any of the servers, VMs or groups you have configured in just a few simple clicks. Storage Manager will show you the event summary and resource usage for the system you are looking at, and it will predict when the drives in that system will reach 100% usage. You can view individual file consumption on the drives, see when the last backup occurred and more still, which makes the software perfect for an administrator that likes to know everything about all the drives in their system.

Reporting is also a strong feature present in SolarWinds Storage Manager, allowing you to generate information on pretty much anything you desire. One such report is the top ten file-types across all your disks, which is what we've included above, but there are so many you can choose from and create that we couldn't possibly list them all.
SolarWinds Storage Manager is also hugely flexible, with licensing available for systems with just 25 disks right up to 30,000 depending on the size of your set-up. With a reasonably powerful server to do the reporting, Storage Manager should have no problems handling 30,000 disks and there is incredibly detailed and extensive support if you ever need help setting up or using the software.