Automatic Defrag: Saving Hours of IT Time

There's nothing like troubleshooting that turns into a ghost-hunting expedition. Several users call and complain of slow performance for example. You look over various statistics, and can see that performance is indeed slowing down—but what's causing it? There just doesn't seem to be a ready answer, so you do the obvious. You tweak the application to make it respond a bit better. You find one process that might be hogging a bit too many network resources and manage to move it off. You tell Marketing to run that mailing list off peak-hours. You sign off the help desk ticket, cross you fingers and hope for the best.

But these "fixes" don't do the trick. Not only do user complaints of slow performance persist, but unexplained process hangs and disk crashes start occurring. The drives are relatively new and were doing fine just a short time ago, so what's the deal? This one is a real bear of a problem, as there's no money in the budget to replace drives. You do your best to load-balance traffic to the affected volumes, but there's a nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach that you haven't located the cause of this issue either.

So it's tough enough getting everything done that needs doing. The last thing an enterprise needs is some other factor interfering with production, something that will impede even the most eager of workers. Power outages, weather phenomena and illness are examples; fortunately these occur infrequently enough that the corporation can move along in spite of them. But when the primary working tool of an employee—the computer system—is constantly slowing down, hanging, periodically crashing and causing storms of calls to the help desk, it's a wonder that managers just don't throw up their hands in defeat and go home.
Such troubleshooting can occupy many valuable hours of IT time—and many might very well be overlooking the actual problem: file fragmentation. File fragmentation causes each and every one of the above symptoms. But because a company has the scheduled defrag set to run periodically, they might easily look right past the root of their many frustrations.

The truth of the matter is that today's computing environments have actually surpassed scheduled defrag's ability to keep up, and unseen fragmentation is continuing to rear its ugly head. First, with busy 24X7 servers, finding times to schedule the task have become increasingly difficult. Even with defrag periodically running, fragmentation continues to build and impact performance and reliability in between these scheduled runs. The result is futile "ghost hunts" for incorrect causes and mounting issues that just don't seem to correct.

As many sites have discovered, a complete solution is one that is automatic With Automatic defrag, trying to schedule defrag is now removed as a problem, as no scheduling is ever required and there is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation. A unique solution to this problem can be an auto defrags software with InvisiTasking technology.

Colleen Toumayan is the Vice President of Public Relations at Diskeeper Corporation. Diskeeper Corporation is an Innovator in Performance and Reliability Technologies®: With over 32 million licenses sold, home users to large corporations on Diskeeper software to provide unparalleled performance.