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

To showcase your products in MCPmag.com, send e-mail to: mailto:mike.gunderloy@mcpmag.com, with "MCPmag News" on the subject line of your message. Publication of submissions are at the sole discretion of the editors.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.

Featured

comments powered by Disqus

Subscribe on YouTube