SmartQuotas allows administrators to control and limit storage usage across their organization, and provision a single pool of Isilon clustered storage to best meet the unique storage challenges faced by their organizations. Using SmartQuotas, storage administrators assign quotas that seamlessly partition a highly scalable, single, shared pool of storage into easily managed segments, with industry-leading flexibility for quotas at the cluster, directory, sub-directory, user, and group. SmartQuotas spans across the entire cluster, regardless of the number of nodes, enabling IT managers to easily administer storage from a single point of view while supporting growing storage demands.

SmartQuotas' thin provisioning capability allows administrators to present more storage capacity to applications and users than is physically installed. Administrators can limit their actual physical storage resources to what is only needed today, and automatically add storage resources on-demand to meet changing business requirements tomorrow.

When actual capacity begins to approach its threshold, SmartQuotas' simple, configurable notifications inform administrators that more storage is required - Isilon IQ storage or EX nodes can then be joined to the cluster in less than 60 seconds. The result is unprecedented pay-as- you-grow flexibility and value for enterprises struggling to cost-effectively keep pace with rapid storage growth.

What makes SmartQuotas such a powerful tool?

Traditional systems with volume quotas are limited to a single storage device - and to a single volume. Volume-level solutions are limited in management flexibility once they are initially set up. For example, typical implementations require the management of quotas across different volumes, multiple storage systems, and multiple file systems. This approach creates challenges when making changes to resources, tracking specific users and groups, moving directory structures, or moving data between file systems and volumes. As more storage silos are added, the complexity only increases.

With SmartQuotas, these management challenges are eliminated. Because SmartQuotas is fully cluster aware and spans across all nodes, regardless of the cluster size, IT managers can administer quotas from a single point of view, provision storage exactly how they want, and change quota policy options on demand.