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Collaborative Storage Management
The first thing that most likely comes to mind when thinking about automated storage
management in a medium to large installation is the management of user home
directories. As we have discussed, File System Factory™ can perform that duty for you
with little effort on your part and still fit into your account provisioning strategy.
However, one of the most powerful components of File System Factory™ is its ability to
create and manage collaborative (group) storage. Networks primarily exist for the purpose
of sharing information with others; making it easy for people to work together on
projects.
In a typical environment, the manager of a working group determines that it would be nice
to have a directory on the network for the group to use to share data. He or she goes to the
network administrator and makes the request. The administrator must perform a list of
actions to fulfill this request. This involves:
1. Creating the group object.
2. Adding the members to the group object.
3. Deciding where to put the storage for the group.
4. Creating the disk space for the group.
5. Optionally creating a set of subdirectories in the storage.
6. Communicating with the manager to determine which parts of the storage the
group should have access to and what access to give.
7. Giving the group appropriate access.
8. Communicating with the manager to determine which parts of the storage the
manager should have special access to.
9. Giving the manager appropriate special access.
10. Repeatedly performing steps 5-9 throughout the life of the group and storage.
File System Factory™ automates steps 3-10 of the above list though the use of Policies,
template processing, and NDS event monitoring.
Organizations can now drive collaborative storage creation, management, and deletion as
a provisioning process using any tool or process that can create groups in the Directory.
Collaborative Storage in Business
In business environments, the HR system can be used as a tool to drive the creation and
automatic membership/owner management of departmental and divisional groups. File
System Factory™ adapts to this environment where workers would be defined as
members
of the group and managers would be defined as
owners
of the group.
Even without any automation driving group management, File System Factory™ can
relieve much of the burden of creating and maintaining shared disk space on the network
since it does all the labor intensive work in the background.
Administrators have the ability to delegate authority to create groups to departmental staff
and still provide disk space to the groups without granting staff administrative rights to
disk volumes or servers objects. The application of Policies with quotas that you define
Novell File System Factory™ Administrator’s Guide
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