It is installed and administered from a Web-based GUI, and deploys an agent to each machine to be surveyed. For Windows environments, it automatically populates the server list. For others, servers must be entered manually. Surveyor collects a lot of information, including server name, IP address, operating system, processors, memory, disk types, partitions and directories. It also collects file information including age, modification rates, creation dates and ownership.
Benefits fall into three key areas.
Information on frequency of changes to data by location is extremely useful in back-up planning and management. SRM reports on where the data is throughout the network and what data is changing most often. Back-up cycles can be set or modified to reflect the usage of the actual data. The second area of benefit is in planning for SAN and NAS implementation. Archiving stale data using hierarchical storage management can reduce expensive storage costs, as can consolidation of servers.