There’s nothing like free software to save some drain on your storage management or data protection budget -- if that free software works, of course.

Here are 10 storage utilities you can download and start using to manage your storage-area network (SAN), deploy network-attached storage (NAS) or monitor and assess the privacy of your network.

While the software listed here is freely downloadable, it is offered mostly as an enticement to try that vendor’s other software or hardware. Products such as Brocade’s SAN Health Diagnostics Capture and SAN Health Professional may whet your whistle for the company’s subscription-based Change Analysis and SAN Health Expert. They will also make you a target for a telephone-based sales pitch on the company’s other products. In most cases to download the software, you’ll first need to supply your name, e-mail address and a phone number to the vendor’s database and if the vendor is doing things right, you can expect that call within weeks of downloading the software.

Some utilities, such as the Amanda backup utility and the FreeNAS deployment software, are truly offered without strings. … That’s not entirely true – for an additional charge, you can purchase support for Amanda from Zmanda.

Network World hasn’t tested these products and can’t be held responsible for their effect on your network or on your storage (in)sanity.

1. Brocade

Product: SAN Health Diagnostics Capture and SAN Health Professional.

Description: SAN Health Diagnostics Capture generates reports on the health of your SAN that is strung together with Brocade and McData switches. The software runs on any Windows workstation that has TCP/IP connectivity to the management port on the Fibre Channel switch. The SAN Health Professional is a data analysis framework that allows monitoring of all the switches in the SAN and the configurations of all the connected devices.

2. Sourceforge.net

Product: FreeNAS.

Description: FreeNAS is an operating system that can be used to convert a PC to a NAS system. It provides disk management capabilities and RAID protection and supports the Unix/Linux Network File System and Windows Common Internet File System. FreeNAS was developed by Oliver Cochard-Labbe, an IT consultant in France. Cochard-Labbe, who heads up support for FreeNAS on SourceForge, estimates that the software is downloaded about 1,000 times a day.