The later versions of DFM (>3.2) are really good at allowing you to define custom reports that have any stat you want (you know, those reports can be accessed from the drop down box on the upper right). Not sure if you can email those reports out yet, but you can always give them a link to it. The one I created had all their qtrees, days till full, space used, and cost. So they would know when they needed space, and how much. The day's till full isn't 100% accurate, but it's a good indicator. I tried to create one that would tell them when a filer would be nearing it's capacity (at which point they would need to purchase a new filer not just disk space, which is a much bigger deal and requires more planning), but that was way to difficult to make understandable. Of course if you had a NAS virtualization device, like NeoPath, that wouldn't matter as much since you could just move them to a location that had space without an outage. You would just need to make sure there was enough space in your overall NAS environment for growth, which is pretty easy.

The best thing about DFM is the price, and it does a great job with NetApp's, but only NetApps. If you're not on the latest version, I would upgrade to that and see if you can do the reports you want. I've looked at AppIQ, TekTools, and NTP as well. All were much better than DFM for generating the pretty graphs that management needs. Personally I thought AppIQ could do the most for file reporting, but wasn't integrated with NetApp very well, yet, and it took forever to setup (plus it's $$$$$). I liked TekTools the best. It gathered everything you would ever want and was pretty good at organizing it. I showed their tool to managers and they loved the graphs, the admins also liked all the stats they could get on one page. NTP was also good, but I eval'd their previous version so I don't want to speak to that since everything may have changed.

Hope this helps, Jeff

--- Carl Howell chowell@uwf.edu wrote:

What are you guys doing to provide storage statistics to your administrators for growth and budget forecasting? We run DFM, but I'm struggling to translate the statistics we get from it into something the administration can understand and act upon.

Thanks in advance for the the help,

Carl Howell Systems Engineer University of West Florida

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