Northern Storage Suite has been voted 'Offering of the year for EMC Celerra' by the EMC Velocity Tech & ISV Partner Program.

EMC conducts an annual awards competition among its top tier solution providers to determine the “best of the best” for developing solutions built on or using EMC Platforms. The ‘Offering of the Year’ award for Celerra (one of only six award categories) broadly recognizes Northern’s singular commitment to leveraging EMC technology, and specifically recognizes Northern’s powerful Content Quota Management (CQM) technology.

Northern Storage Suite for EMC offers advanced support for EMC Celerra NAS devices.

Northern Storage Suite for EMC integrates with a new technology released in Celerra 5.6: the Celerra Event Publishing Agent [CEPA]. CEPA is an additional module of the Celerra Event Enabler [CEE] framework and is an API-based mechanism for distributing notifications and context details of file system activity. Northern Storage Suite uses these event notifications in its quota operations - specifically; to implement very efficient locking and blocking policies.

Northern Storage Suite for EMC delivers flexible, scalabale and high performance content quota management for Celerra environments:

Quotas on User Accounts
Control usage by user account; within project or shared department folders.

File Blocking Quotas
Prevent users from saving specific file types - stop them hiding mp3 collections in their user shares. Non-intrusive extension scanning ensures zero system lag.

High Performance NAS Quotas
Specifically affecting real-time functionality [storage quotas and file blocking quotas], Northern Storage Suite for EMC maintains a fast access list of file and path sizes in memory. When a change occurs, instead of rescanning the entire quota path Northern Storage Suite simply retreives the new size of the individual file and compares this to the known size, increasing quota usage by the difference - reduced scanning, reduced network traffic and reduced Disk I/O.

This list, or file cache, is populated and updated as files are used - Northern Storage Suite for EMC always remembers the most active files in the environment. Also, the size of this cache is set at a maximum of 400,000 files per volume [56MB per volume] and can be edited through the registry.

Hybrid quotas
The majority of file-system activity takes place well under quota thresholds. Hybrid quotas make use of this fact to focus system resources only where they are needed. Quota targets are monitored passively, guaranteeing zero impact on day-to-day file system activity and maximizing performance. When a target passes a locking threshold its priority rating is immediately increased; the object is locked and it is added to a high-priority monitoring list to guarantee immediate unlocking when usage decreases.

Without this hybrid architecture all file system activity would be delayed while quota objects are scanned and policies are checked. With the architecture, activity is only delayed long enough to check an internal list of locked objects - no scanning is required whatsoever.

REQUIREMENTS
A Windows host should be designated as the managing host for the datamover[s] involved in the deployment. There are specific operating system requirements for the Celerra and as with generic CIFS compliant NAS devices Northern Storage Suite for EMC requires that the paths it will be managing are configured with pure CIFS or mixed CIFS/NFS security protocol support. NFS data cannot be managed.

The specific hardware and operating system requirements for management of Celerra environments are detailed below: