News
Executive Software DiskAlert Ships Version 2.0
Per-CPU licensing, electronic updates added to latest version. Plus news from Legato, Raxco, Remotely Anywhere, and SureSync
Executive Software has released version 2.0 of its DiskAlert hard drive monitoring
program. The idea behind DiskAlert is simple: It monitors the health of your
hard drives, and if it detects a problem, it notifies you. Notifications can
be sent via e-mail, pager, or even telephone call (if you've got a modem in
the computer). The product can monitor IDE or SCSI hard drives and includes
full support for software mirroring as well as the most popular hardware RAID
controllers. Besides looking for disk errors and impending failure, DiskAlert
can also warn you about drives that are getting full, with a user-settable warning
threshold.
In addition to refining the failure detection algorithm to be more accurate
and catch more failure modes, version 2.0 introduces several licensing changes.
First, the full DiskAlert Administrator version (which can monitor drives on
multiple machines across the network) is now priced at $249.95 per computer
being monitored (the previous version was priced per drive). Second, there's
a new DiskAlert Desktop version, available at $42 via electronic delivery, that
monitors the drives on a single computer.
I gave DiskAlert Administrator a spin on my own test network and it was one
of the easiest to install administrative utilities I've ever worked with. Hosted
in the familiar MMC interface, the user interface makes it easy to add drives
to monitor and easy to see the health of the monitored drives. Icons in the
tree view alert you instantly to any trouble spots, and you can drill into detailed
information on a particular drive with a few mouse clicks.
DiskAlert runs on Windows NT, 2000, and XP. One particular target market for
this product is IT consultants and service providers, who can install "set it
and forget it" warnings on customer computers. Imagine getting e-mail that your
customer's hard drive is about to fail, instead of a phone call after it fails!
If you'd like to have a look for yourself, there are full details and downloadable
trial versions on the company's Web site at http://www.diskalert.com
.
More new and updated products:
** Legato Networker 6.2 implements the new NDMP standard for backup of data
from Network Attached Storage (NAS) file servers. This lets your Windows-based
backup servers handle the backup needs of your NAS boxes.
http://www.legato.com
** Raxco PerfectDisk 5.0 extends defragmentation to very large disks, with
new features to defrag disks of 100 GB and up, even with very little free space.
A demo version download is available.
http://www.raxco.com
** Remotely Anywhere 4.0 is a new release of this remote control product. It
adds Windows XP compatibility and SSH2 encryption for remote control sessions.
http://www.remotelyanywhere.com
** SureSync 4.0, from Software Pursuits, extends the capabilities of this file
and directory replication solution. The new version adds a multiple-agent architecture,
QoS, and smart partial file copying to allow replication with substantially
less network impact than before. Trial version available.
http://www.suresync.com
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About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.