Novell introduced Novell Storage Manager some years back. Formerly called File System Factory, the software allows IT managers to monitor and manage the unstructured data - Word, Excel, PDFs - residing on the file servers in their environments.

We at SSG-NOW had a demo of Novell Storage Manager last week. The product, which manages not only Novell NetWare and Open Enterprise Server file servers, also manages Windows NTFS servers. It is able to discover information, retrieve it and store it on disk, tape or archive – all locations where it can be managed during its lifecycle.

The administrator can assign policies that reflect how the information will be treated based on its value to the organization, And they can protect it from accidental deletion or corruption.

What is so very cool about Novell Storage Manager though is that Novell has taken a different approach to storage resource management – the company has tied the product directly to identity – that is, information is tied to employees or groups of individuals – it is integrated with Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory.

When an employee joins a company, they can immediately be assigned storage capacity on whatever file server or file servers the company has. When they change location in a company, their data can be migrated based on their identity.

As data ages, it can be migrated again to different tiers of storage – all without a user knowing about it. Novell Storage Manager policies can determine storage capacity and user quotas, be used for file grooming and data migration.

The product is priced at $12 per user.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.