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By Jeff Dunkelberger
Network World, 4/27/98

The Windows NT operating system is fairly mature, but one remaining administrative difficulty can be particularly irksome for intranet managers. In NT, Microsoft Corp. still offers no way to control user disk space usage on a network server.

With the increasing amount of information being made available on corporate Webs, this NT fault can give intranet managers quite a headache. Thankfully, NTP Software's Quota Manager for Windows NT can remedy this deficiency.

Quota Manager lets you manage a server's storage resources. Once quotas are set, Quota Manager monitors storage devices and notifies users and administrators if a designated threshold is reached. If users disregard the warning and reach their quota, Quota Manager locks the directory, forcing the users to delete items or speak to an administrator for a quota increase.

On an intranet, this means you can keep each internal home page down to 5M bytes of storage, as many Internet service providers with Unix hosts do, or ensure that all departmental content providers get an equal amount of space for their page publishing needs.

Quota Manager Standard Edition allows full use and administration of disk quotas for all users while running in the background as an NT service. It includes administration and inquiry software tools. The Enterprise Edition includes everything in the standard version plus a feature called Quota Linking. This feature lets an administrator link quotas by grouping quota-protected shares and lock them together. Quota Linking lets the state of one quota affect the state of other quotas.

There are three types of quota links. Aggregate links are grouped together and affected when the total for the entire group reaches a predefined limit. In a joined link, when any quota in the link exceeds its limit, all the quotas get locked. In the final type, called master/slave links, if the master quota hits its limit, all the slave quotas get locked.

Also included in the Enterprise Edition are Startup Protection and Quota Ownership features. Startup Protection lets an administrator set a reduced level of quota protection when the system starts. The setting can be used to determine whether all quotas, no quotas or a specified number of quotas are verified at server startup. This feature lets an administrator choose maximum protection (complete quota integrity)or zero verification (reduced start-up load on the server), or strike a balance in between. Quota Ownership sends messages to a respective owner of an exceeded quota instead of to the administrator. This helps make the users accountable for managing their disk space and eases administrative burdens.

Quotas can be set on any shared resource via the administration tool. The tool offers views of all shares, all quotas and any shares that are more than their quotas.

Quotas are set object by object, meaning an administrator can set limits individually on any directory or share. Setting quotas on objects simplifies things by applying quotas to a resource that will be in effect for anyone using that resource.

The inquiry tool lets users manage their own quotas, but it may not be necessary if users are notified of their quota by some other method. But having users manage their own disk space is a fundamental principle in Quota Manager. The idea is that allowing users to manage their quotas frees administrators to concentrate on other important tasks.

Once the administrator sets the quotas, it is a user's responsibility to stay under them. Quota Manager notifies the users based on the threshold set by the administrator. The threshold is the percentage of the overall quota used to issue warnings to the user that an object is near the quota limit.