Veritas Data Insight is now on version 6.1 and one of the areas that Veritas Data Insight can help, is to allow administrators a tool-set to look at reclaiming storage.

What I mean by this, is that Veritas Data Insight is predominately sold as a data governance tool, but it does provide some additional benefits for those Server Administrator, Storage Engineers or anyone else within an IT Department with a vested interest in storage usage, in allowing them to find utilisation and even areas of inactivity that could be targeted for archiving or deletion.

With scanning occurring frequently a side effect of this is that growth and activity can be monitored.

With the Veritas Data Insight Growth report, which can be scheduled to run periodically and tailored to show a duration, from the last one hour or for a number of years, this very rudimentary report can be useful in determining growth of any filers monitored.

The table below shows a very basic report for three file servers.

With basic Metrics like Capacity at start and end of period, Growth, Free Space and others, even a simple report like this could provide some useful information.

A chart, like the one below is shown for each filer and is more simplistic to understand.

With a quick once over of the growth trend report once a month, the report could provide a quick indicator of any potential issues brewing.

Veritas Data Insight also provides information on inactive folders. This could be useful to administrators as it could provide a starting point for some manual clean up operations, like moving the folders to another cheaper storage, manually archiving and then compressing them.

Another alternative is to create a report, that is generated as a CSV file and then with some scripting to semi-automate the process.

Lastly, you could use the integration with Veritas Enterprise Vault File Archiving. Allowing the files to be archived. With Veritas Enterprise Vault File Archiving, you can send those files to cheaper storage (or to the cloud) and either replace the file with a small stub or remove it completely.

With Veritas Enterprise Vault File System Archiving integrated with Veritas Data Insight, you can utilise the single instancing of files and enable enhanced policies to put those file on a countdown to deletion or retained forever.

One other report that could help is the ‘Potential Duplicate File’ report that comes standard.

With a couple of tweaks to the default report, like limiting how many rows it will produce and the time frame to be reported on, the report could be used to script the movement of those files to another location, perhaps on some cheaper storage.

Or use something like Veritas Enterprise Vault File System Archiving which can be integrated into Veritas Data Insight and allow both systems to work in harmony, stubbing files and moving them to a central repository, allowing Veritas Enterprise Vault File System Archiving to take care of the single instancing of those files and if configured, using the relevant retention policy to maintain those files for defined periods of time before they are deleted.

Look out for a few more blogs from us on Veritas Data Insight, when we look at some of the other key areas that Veritas Data insight can help.

The next blog will look around the topic of ownership and activity and why this may become a hot potato on the coming months.