File Analyzer - reports to manage your file servers.
Do you really know what's on your file servers?
- The amount of data stored on network servers is growing at over 20% per year.
- Even though hardware storage costs per gigabyte are dropping, the costs of managing storage are skyrocketing.
- 27% of companies expect to keep files forever. It's too expensive to manage manually.
- In most organizations, 50% of data files on servers will never be accessed again.
Download the Free Storage Savings Estimator tool here |
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Optimize Your File Servers!
File Analyzer helps you save storage:
- Reporting - Understand what you have. View your files by server, by owner, by size, by type, by name, etc. to pinpoint the usage and abuse of your storage. Find old files, unneeded files, duplicate files, and give information to users that abuse their space allocation.
- Deleting - Take action. Clean up your file servers and purge old and unneeded files. From any report, just check the box next to a file name and click Delete. Reclaim your storage in minutes.
Lower Management Costs
File Analyzer makes housekeeping easy for IT professionals trying to relieve the pressure of disk storage filling up. File Analyzer reports are always up to date and ready for immediate action.
Use File Analyzer reports to clean up your file servers
Every storage admin tells us how their server storage space is out of control. File servers get filled up with duplicates, old files, graphics, document versions, backups, ex-employees' data, and "some day I'll get around to it" folders.
Here's how we did a file server clean up. Our plan was to get rid of duplicates, old files, and files that were no longer needed - without having to change anything for our users.
We needed to understand what we had so we could make some decisions. File Analyzer is perfect for that - it gives us reports and graphs with valuable insight into our file servers.
We selected a few folder paths to analyze where we knew we would get the most savings. Our first report was by File Creation Date. Creation date is deceptive if files are copied from one directory to another.
So we moved on to the report on Modified Date. Aha! We have files out there from over 20 years ago!
To make it easy for our boss to understand, we showed him two graphs - one by quantity of files and the other by storage space. 
Lots of files in 1990 but more space is used by files from 1995.
We drilled into the year 1995. Found multiple duplicates of a zip file - that can't be used on any servers since it is so old. We just deleted them (check the box and click on the trash can icon).
In 2007 we found lots of junk - more zip files and tons of MP3s just wasting space. We just deleted them (check the box and click on the trash can icon).
Being the brilliant analysts - we decided to look at the report on file types. Another aha! Over 40% of our space is taken up by videos and music. This Spring Cleaning for space savings is going to be a winner!
Drilling into the MP3 extension type showed us folders and libraries that are duplicates of each other. Gasp! 
This discovery led us to the overall Duplicates report. 
So we drill in to the server to see more. Wow! There were a lot of duplicates - including YouTube videos... thought we told everyone not to save them on the file server? We did a bunch of click - delete and gained back a lot of storage space.
Next we went to the Age reports tp get rid of old files. Look at that - we have files from over 20 years ago! Ha! These are Epson MX-80 printer drivers (guarantee we threw those out over 15 years ago). Hey, this Spring Cleaning is easy.
Then we moved on to Owners to see who are the biggest abusers. We noticed the BUILTIN\Administrators account had a lot of files. This happens when our admin logs on locally to the file server and copies files.
Tom was the biggest user (abuser). Lots of files got copied into his folders (backing stuff up) or just saving a copy of all the cool videos and MP3s? 
Within a few hours we cleaned up our file servers and gained back a large amount of space. File Analyzer made it easy.
Our next step will be to put in automated policies to keep the file servers clean using the File Archiver policies to delete, archive, or stub files.
How File Analyzer Works
File Analyzer is a software application that runs on a Windows Server (real or virtual) with small Agent software that runs on your file servers (or with access to your network servers).
The agents gather file information on your servers. The process is called an Inventory - it is automatically updated every few minutes for file servers and scheduled for network servers. You can analyze any folder path(s) on your file servers by setting up WatchPoints. The initial inventory process is a busy time for the agents as they gather the metadata on all the files in the WatchPoints. The agents send small packets to the File Analyzer server to maintain balance with network traffic.
The File Analyzer server takes the inventoried file information and stores it in a SQL database. For size estimating, one million files takes about one gigabyte of SQL storage space. The File Analyzer reports are generated from the SQL database and available through the File Analzyer browser interface. For very large installations, the report data can be cached to provide quick response.
Pricing
File Analyzer permanent licensing offers flexible pricing by:
- File server - unlimited storage
- Terabyte - unlimited agents
- User - unlimited servers and storage
Annual Maintenance Fee: includes technical support
(email - live chat - phone), updates, upgrades, and fixes.
Remote Installation Assistance: WebEx session by our technical support team
- Validate completion of the pre-requisites including permissions and database connectivity
- Installation of the File Analyzer server and agents - assist you with wizards
- Set up inventory schedule - OnGoing for file servers and Scheduled for NAS servers
- After initial inventory completed - review reports and suggest best practices
File Analyzer Resources
File Analyzer Datasheet - How to Free Up Hundreds of Gigabytes of Storage!
