The recent release of OES 2015 is a big leap forward in terms of both capabilities and reliability. With the expanded storage capacity for network volumes, NSS file system access from Microsoft Active Directory, iPrint enhancements, and an extensive range of performance improvements, upgrading to OES 2015 should be a the objective of every customer running earlier versions of OES or even NetWare.

For most customers, this upgrade will be conducted as an across-the-wire migration, which is the process of copying files and their associated permissions and metadata from the source OES or NetWare servers, to the target OES 2015 servers. Before doing so however, you'll want to make an assessment of the files on your source servers and do any necessary file cleanup. Explaining the need for this cleanup beforehand, one astute network administrator summed it up nicely by asking "if you were moving into a new home, would you have your yard sale before you moved, or afterwards?"

File cleanup includes both file disposal and file archiving, and when it comes to determining what files to delete, archive, or maintain in your NSS file system, there's nothing better than Micro Focus File Reporter.

Identifying Files to Delete, Archive, and Retain Using File Reporter

There are a variety of built-in report types and analysis tools in File Reporter that you can easily and quickly help you determine which files should be deleted, which files should be archived, and which files should be retained and migrated.



The Add Report Definition dialog box with the built-in report options. Built-in reports outlined in red would be especially useful to a network administrator needing to know which files to delete, which files to archive, and which files to retain.

For example, generating a Date-Age report gives you file count data according to when files were created, last accessed, or last modified. Within the report, you can click any year or month you're interested in and a corresponding Date-Age Detail report will be generated, providing you the location of all files created in that month or year and when they were last accessed. If you determine that many of these files have not been accessed in a number of years, you should either archive them to secondary storage, or delete them altogether.

The heat map in File Reporter is another tool that lets you quickly view file content and determine what to do with it before the migration. The heat map graphically displays file content by either file extension, ownership, or file age.



The heat map lets you view file system content according to file extensions, ownership (displayed above) and age. Note: The large yellow block is a single 12.69 GB video file that was created for a tradeshow two years ago. This is certainly a file that should be deleted before the migration.

Once you have identified the files you want to delete, archive, and retain, you're ready to start automating the deletion and archiving of files using Storage Manager policies.

Deleting and Archiving Files through Storage Manager

Micro Focus Storage Manager policies let you create Cleanup rules where you indicate whether to delete or archive files based on your specifications. This means that you can set rules to archive files whose original owners have left the organization, delete files that have not been accessed for a set amount of time, archive non-work related files such as music files from a user home folder, archive only certain file types while deleting others, and so forth.

By simply running the appropriate Management Action with a click of the mouse, Storage Manager then automatically removes all of the files you don't want migrated off of the source NetWare or OES server before you migrate the retained files to the new OES 2015 server.

Automating the Migration Using Storage Manager

With the files archived and deleted, you're ready to move the files you want to retain. This is done easily by simply changing the target path in the Storage Manager policy to a new path on the OES 2015 server. If you have multiple OES servers, you can distribute the migration across multiple paths.



Once you change to policy to a new target path on an OES 2015 server, you simply select the Enforce Policy Path Management Action to begin migrating the files from the source OES or NetWare servers to the new OES servers.

You then perform an Enforce Policy Path Management Action, which is done by simply selecting the menu option.



With the Run in Check Mode check box selected, you can preview which user home directories are going to be migrated to the new server.

For all directories not managed through a Storage Manager User policy or Group policy (such as an applications directory) you can copy data using the Data Management option. Data Management lets you copy a specific set of data and its associated rights, ownership, and other metadata from one location to another without requiring a policy. If you choose, you can preserve all of the permissions and quota settings in the process.

Additional options let you overwrite existing duplicate files or folders, remove files from the source location once they are copied to the target location, and skip open files.



Use the Data Management option to copy all directories that are not managed through either a Storage manager User policy or Group policy. In the example above, an applications directory is being migrated from an OES2 server to an OES2015 server.

In summary, File Reporter, through a variety of reports and analytics tools, inventories the OES or NetWare servers you want to migrate and helps you determine what to retain, archive and delete. Then Storage Manager automates the deletion and archiving of those files. It can then migrate your files to the new OES 2015 servers. It can even distribute the files according to different distribution conditions.

But Data Migration is Only One Use for These Products

It's important that you remember that these are not products that you will use for the migration, and then never use again. These products will continue to bring value to your OES 2015 network after the migration.

File Reporter is the means of generating file permissions reports, storage cost reports, trending (meaning storage growth) reports, comparison reports between two points in time for the file system and the file permissions. And with the capability to generate Custom Query reports through direct SQL commands, there's virtually no limit to what you can report on.

With Storage Manager deployed, you can use it to automatically provision the network storage directories for all users and groups, manage disk quota, load balance storage among servers, automate file transfers and moves, provision files to home directories based on the user role, groom personal files that shouldn't reside on the network, and much more.

You can learn more about File Reporter and Storage Manager by visiting the product pages here and here.