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Top Tips of 2007 -- Storage Management
Tip 1: Manage servers and SANs better by understanding SCSI
Most servers and SANs use SCSI drives, which typically perform better than the IDE hard drives prevalent in workstations and consumer-grade computers. In short, it's almost impossible for an administrator to allocate storage in a SAN, build a cluster or set up a hardware-based RAID array without understanding how SCSI works.
Tip 2: Volume Shadow Copy Service lets users restore files
Admin dream: Users restoring their own files. And if you have some disk space to spare, you can enable this capability directly in Windows Server 2003 through the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
Tip 3: How to configure a backup device for Remote Storage
The Remote Storage file migration service requires a backup device to migrate the data from the managed volume. Here are the steps for enabling a backup device.
Tip 4: Tools to automate full-system backups
As network speeds increase and storage space cheapens, the emphasis has shifted from selective backups to full-system backups. Our desktop management expert tells administrators about the tools they can use to automate full-system backups.
Tip 5: Install Remote Storage on Windows Server 2003
The Remote Storage file system service in Windows Server 2003 is used to automatically archive data to removable media from a managed NTFS volume. Here's how to install it in minutes.
Tip 6: Use ASR to restore cluster disk signatures
Sometimes a cluster disk signature gets overwritten and the cluster can no longer identify shared disks or read volume information. If this happens, an administrator can restore cluster disk signatures using Automated System Recovery (ASR).
Tip 7: Use FSRM to create file screens and enforce storage restrictions
Use the File Server Resource Manager utility in Windows Server 2003 R2 to create file screens, which disallow your users from saving certain file types.
Tip 8: Backing up and restoring server cluster nodes
The process of backing up cluster nodes is basically the same as backing up and restoring a standalone server running WS03, although restoring a cluster may take additional steps.
Tip 9: Data Protection Manager V2 offers bare metal restore
Microsoft's latest version of Data Protection Manager can perform synchronizations every 15 minutes and offers bare metal restore for servers. But agents used with the first version will not work with V2.
Tip 10: Keep your file server's storage pool from running dry
Users love to hold on to files. How can administrators keep their file server's storage pool from running dry? One way is to fool your users into thinking the drive is full.
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