Storage and File System Support

Great changes have been made in the area of storage and file system support, including a new version of NTFS—version 5—that allows disk quotas for monitoring and limiting disk space usage on NTFS volumes while drastically improving security. Administrators can establish global disk quotas that prevent users from saving or copying more data to a storage device once they have reached their quota.

Removable Storage

Removable Storage lets you manage your online libraries, such as changers and jukeboxes, and track removable tapes and disks. It presents a common interface to robotic media changers and media libraries, and enables multiple applications to share local libraries and tape or disk drives. It also controls removable media within a single-server system.

Remote Storage

Remote Storage makes it easy to increase disk space on the server without adding more hard disks. It automatically monitors the amount of free space available on local hard disks. When the free space on a managed hard disk goes below a specified level, Remote Storage automatically removes any local data that Removable Storage has already copied to Remote Storage (while keeping the directory and property information active), providing the free disk space you need. Working with Remote Storage, Hierarchical Storage management moves data to slower, low-cost storage devices until needed. When required, the data is automatically moved back to faster disk drives. Both Remote Storage and Removable Storage are covered in Chapter 17.

Disk Administrator

Using Windows 2000 Server Disk Administrator, system administrators can create, extend, or mirror a volume without shutting down the system or interrupting users. These tasks can be performed remotely. In addition, volume mount points make hundreds of disk volumes accessible without drive letter limitations. The details of disk administration are covered in Chapter 15.

Microsoft Distributed File System

Microsoft Distributed File System (Dfs) identifies files using a common naming scheme, making it easy to browse the network to find the data and files you need. With Dfs, you can create a single directory tree that includes multiple file servers and file shares in a group, division, or enterprise, so you can have logical views of directories and files, regardless of where those files physically reside on the network. Dfs is covered in Chapter 17.

NTFS 5

The new version of NTFS offers many performance enhancements and a host of new features. System administrators have requested many of these features for some time—most notably per-user disk quotas. Distributed link tracking is also part of the NTFS 5 package. With this tracking system, even after a file is moved or has undergone a name change, a shortcut link to the file still works. Public-key encryption is also included in NTFS 5, enabling you to protect and easily manage sensitive material in a manner that is totally transparent to the user.

The not-so-good news about NTFS 5 is that its new features make dual booting more complex. To dual boot with Windows NT 4 and have an NTFS partition, you must use Windows NT 4 with Service Pack 4 or later. The service pack makes the NTFS 5 files readable when the machine is booted into Windows NT. See Chapter 5 for more on issues of dual booting.



Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Administrator's Companion
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Administrators Companion
ISBN: 0735617856
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 320

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