Fragmentation Prevention—and the Need for Speed

BURBANK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One of the foundations for any business is the speed at which it operates. Customers don’t like to wait; if it’s going to take three weeks to get a product, that customer might well go someplace else. Or, if a prospect or customer is going to have to wait for a service (think of the last time you had to hang around for the cable installer), it can be truly annoying. In any line of business, servicing customers rapidly and accurately will mean better company repute and satisfied clients.

“Now that the data has been reorganized on the hard drives, their performance has drastically increased”

Internally, there can be many factors that slow down service. Items such as idle employees, clumsy or time-wasting flow lines or defective parts are at least things that can be spotted and corrected relatively quickly. There are subtler culprits, however, that may not be so easy—such as slow computers.

One common cause of slow computers is file fragmentation. If not dealt with fully and adequately, it can be a constant source of problems.

“Our workstations and servers were acting very sluggish, especially since we are continually applying patches against the latest security vulnerabilities,” said Daniel Greenland, Information Systems Infrastructure Specialist with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. “One of the primary sources of fragmentation we had, was due to excess use of the local paging file, as most of our workstations were not equipped with enough memory. But even with extra memory installed, severe fragmentation had already occurred and the hard drives were really taxed with reading applications and data that was spread across the drive.”

Like many sites today, Greenland discovered Diskeeper^® performance software. Utilizing a new revolutionary technology called IntelliWrite^™, Diskeeper 2010 intelligently writes files to the disk to prevent up to 95 percent of fragmentation from occurring. Coupled with Diskeeper’s superior defragmentation technology, Diskeeper 2010 delivers a complete performance solution for every Windows system at every site, and goes far beyond what defragmentation alone can achieve. Significant savings are also achieved reducing energy consumption and cooling—even more than is done with conventional defragmentation.

“Since Diskeeper has been on the system, both workstations and servers are much more responsive,” Greenland said. “Our developers and administrators who actually make program additions and maintain the system have found a significant improvement with overall response of their development applications.”

To add even more response, Diskeeper I-FAAST^® technology orders frequently-accessed files for quicker access. “Now that the data has been reorganized on the hard drives, their performance has drastically increased,” Greenland said.

All of this functionality occurs invisibly, in the background, using resources that would be otherwise idle. Scheduling is never required, and the only performance impact on users is a positive one—response time and system reliability are fully maximized.

“Faster is better!” Greenland concluded.