The best thing about Spacemonger (www.sixty-five.cc/sm, $24.95) isn’t that its intuitive display of how space is used on a hard drive allows you to pinpoint what’s taking up the space on your hard drives in a matter of seconds. The screen area shows a colour-coded and hierarchical treemap where the size of the box for each directory or file is in proportion to the space it takes on the drive. Hover the mouse over any element to see a popup with more detail, and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom down to level of individual files.

Work through these steps when you first engage with a customer over a backup plan.

Backup software
Simplification is the most important thing when designing a backup system. Look for software that runs across all the operating systems you are backing up and that has the right agents and plug-ins for the applications your customer uses.

Remote backup services can offer the speed of disk, the security of tape, and the simplicity of a consumer service. But how do you ensure that remote backup services comply with your clients’ data policies and integrate with their existing IT set-ups?

All hardware fails – and backup is seen as boring and unreliable. That combination is the perfect opportunity for you to provide a service that provides business continuity and ongoing revenue. But how do you design the right backup system?

The stay at home server turns out to be the little server that could, with plenty of business friendly features.
Even the smallest business will find a server useful, whether it’s just for sharing files and connecting them to the Web or delivering applications.

Servers are particularly susceptible to file fragmentation as they deal with multiple requests from a wide range of users and often have more complicated drive setups such as RAIDs and SANs.

Setting up SANmelody to create your own storage fabric

When you install the operating system on the storage server do not format the disks you will use for storage, just initialise them. The storage software will take care of everything else.

There are three types of storage you can provide to your customers: Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networking (SAN). What you choose will affect the cost, the solution and the levels of support and services you can offer.