SolarWinds Storage Profiler 4.12 review

Are your storage networks out of control? SolarWinds claims its Storage Profiler software is easier to use and better value than most other SRM products. Read this review to see if it really can bring order to chaos.

IT Pro Verdict

If you’re not sure what’s on your storage network then we recommend checking out Storage Profiler as it’s capable of providing a lot of useful information about an extensive range of devices. You will need the optional modules to get the best out of it, but this software will make sure you never run out of storage space again.

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For testing we had all options licensed and found installation to be a simple task with the Profiler server loaded on a Windows Server 2008 system in a few minutes. It doesn't offer automated agent deployment so we installed these manually on our Windows Server 2003, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 test systems.

The console's home page opens with a basic summary of managed systems and provides plenty of links to help and tutorials. Profiler uses policies and rules to control most functions. One rule allows agents to auto-register with the server which we found occurred within seconds of the agent being loaded.

A network discovery tool looks for EMC, LSI, NetApp and VMware systems and a new feature is support for SMI-S. Our test environment also included a VMware ESX Server 4 system which Profiler found and, once we had provided login credentials, added it to the list of managed hosts. SNMP must be configured for VMware and we found SolarWinds provides excellent instructions for this.

The main console page has an overview of monitored resources with pie charts showing total usable and raw storage plus VMware datastore usage. Beneath this are tables showing the top ten servers with the least amount of storage capacity available along with the highest processor and memory usage.

Select any of these graphs and you can drill down for more information and eventually arrive at individual systems. This window shows disk, processor, memory and network performance graphs as well as a capacity analysis which lets you see if free space on each volume is declining or increasing.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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