There’s no doubt that as the amounts of data needed to be managed continue to spiral out of control, there’s a need to optimize limited storage resources. That issue has a lot more IT organizations paying attention to disk defragmentation issues. The trouble is, however, that not all disk defragmentation is created equal in terms of application performance.
This is what makes the latest release of Diskeeper 2011 worth noting. Instead of blindly defragmenting disks, the new release identifies the defragmentation issues that are likely to have an impact on specific application performance.
According to Michael Materie, Diskeeper chief strategist for products and technologies, this new Diskeeper capability takes advantage of IntelliWrite technology that prevents up to 85 percent of fragmentation before it ever happens and a new Instant Defrag feature that understands how files are used and immediately defrags the ones that will be used right now.
In general, disk defragmentation has been relegated to being just another IT housekeeping chore. But as more applications begin to share the same IT infrastructure thanks to the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, the more fragmentation becomes an I/O performance optimization issue.
So while dealing with fragmentation is not likely to solve all your storage issues, you might be surprised to discover just how far a little preventative maintenance can actually go.
