10 free storage utilities

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.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

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.

3. IBM

Product: Omnifind Yahoo Edition.

Description: Omnifind Yahoo Edition is a software-based search capability that lets IT administrators search both enterprise networks and the Internet from a single interface. It supports as many as 500,000 documents and more than 200 file types. The software supports wildcard and Boolean searches. It runs on any workstation that has a 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 80GB of disk space, running Windows or Red Hat or SUSE Linux.

4. Neopath Networks

Product: Fileyzer.

Description: Fileyzer is software that lets IT administrators analyze the files on Windows file servers and NAS devices. It presents the information in a graphical manner, showing administrators how storage can best be utilized and letting them recover wasted storage. Fileyzer works on Windows XP SP2 workstations that have 512MB of RAM and 10MB of disk space.