Northern Storage Suite 8.6 Released

NORTHERN Parklife, Inc., provider of SRM solutions, announced Northern Storage Suite 8.6, which adds enhanced discovery and automation to its reporting tool, increasing visibility across the enterprise storage infrastructure without adding administrative overhead.

One of the key new features offers ‘scripted path definition,’ enabling IT administrators to adapt reports to all manner of network and file system configurations on-the-fly, making storage reporting even more enterprise-friendly.

Typically, storage reports are created by defining what properties to look for (file type, size, age, owner, etc.) and where to look (\domain.comusers, \machinenamedepartment, etc.). Now admins can exert control over the reports by automating the capture of user share definitions from Active Directory, match department membership and only include user shares for members of a specific department, parse xml, txt or Excel files to collect path definitions. While there are similarities between network and file system configurations, there are always differences especially in enterprise environments; affording this level of customization in report definition ensures that unforseen network ‘peculiarities’ are discovered and accounted for, without adding to administrative overhead.

Northern Storage Suite 8.6 optimizes reporting functionality and includes an array of incremental enhancements that improve performance and reliability.

"Storage management is an ongoing challenge, as networks and technologies evolve and enterprise organizations adapt to a changing business landscape," says Jonas Areskoug, Northern’s CEO. "The new version of Northern Storage Suite delivers a host of focused improvements that simplify the task of constraining data growth, enabling administrators to assure optimal storage and system performance without tying down valuable staff resources."