Dozens of employees, with desktops averaging four to eight GB, started to copy their desktop data to the servers simultaneously. The servers couldn t take the pounding. Not every IT organization has hurricane warnings to worry about. Specifically, they need to be concerned about uncontrolled server disk capacity consumption by employees. This percentage includes failures by servers that have exceeded their capacity.
Overloaded capacity can make a server s performance suffer.
Short of a complete server crash, any employee can seriously compromise server performance and application availability by storing large files on servers shared by other employees. Some systems administrators deal with this problem by manually babysitting a server s capacity level or using load balancing to control the amount of data on a server. A better solution is setting multiple, real-time directory disk quota thresholds on the amount of space assigned to each employee and to each department. Employees should receive automatic alert notifications as they get close to their quota thresholds. This procedure allows systems administrators to allocate storage evenly as a shared resource, and to make sure the types of documents saved conform to the IT department s policy for what belongs on the server.