Scans

StorCycle provides a scan feature enabling a scan of all files in the configured storage location.The scan identifies important information such as file size, file type, and file age (last access, last accessed date, last modified date, and creation date) to help users make informed decisions as to what data they would like to migrate to a perpetual tier of storage. StorCycle is capable of scanning specific directories or the entire file system of any storage location accessible by the StorCycle server . Once a scan is completed, users can view the results to see how much data is in the pre-defined primary storage location and gain insight to the location’s contents such as age and size. The scan results can also be used as part of a migration job to move some or all of the files to the Perpetual Tier of storage.

How Scanning Works

Fast scan speed is critical for a successful storage management solution. StorCycle has been developed from the ground up to maximize scan performance. There are two limitations that must be considered when developing a successful file scanner for a data management solution – the rate at which information can be collected from the primary storage system about the files being scanned, and the rate at which that collected data can be recorded in the database of the storage management solution.

StorCycle uses server memory to the greatest extent possible to best address these limitations. Scan data is collected in memory and then written to the StorCycle database in batches to optimize write performance. StorCycle also uses hundreds of parallel programming threads to collect scan data. With these optimizations, organizations not using job throttling (see below) can expect to see a scan rate on the order of thousands of files per second. This performance will vary depending on the storage, server and network environment. Thousands of files per second equates to millions or tens of millions of files per hour and tens of millions or hundreds of millions of files per day.