If you've been around the PC world for a while you’ll no doubt have encountered Diskeeper, the unattended defrag tool. With modern server storage using RAID controllers and SSDs you may think that the need for this kind of software is over, but Condusiv, the company behind Diskeeper, believes otherwise.
It's launching Diskeeper 15 Server, a fragmentation prevention solution for storage area network (SAN) systems connected to physical servers to keep both servers and storage running like new.
While modern RAID controllers do a good job of managing data at the physical disk layer, which helps in the fight against file fragmentation, it does nothing about fragmentation at the logical software layer that Windows sees. This is the primary reason why SAN storage performance degrades over time.
"Even with over 45 million Diskeeper licenses sold, Condusiv is not sitting still in regard to addressing performance-robbing fragmentation wherever it appears in the data center. Performance-robbing file fragmentation affects SAN storage equally as much as it affects server local storage or Direct-Attached Storage. As much as Condusiv offers a robust software solution to accelerate virtual environments, the fact remains that some of the most mission-critical applications still run on physical servers. That’s not a small number considering there are over five million physical servers in production across North America and EMEA," says Brian Morin, SVP, Global Marketing at Condusiv Technologies.
Diskeeper 15 Server's real-time fragmentation prevention software operates at the physical server layer where input/output operations originate. By preventing files from being fractured and broken apart into pieces before being written to disk or SSD in a non-sequential manner, fragmentation is eliminated before it becomes an issue. That means a SAN storage system never needs to be taken offline for defragmentation maintenance. Significantly it also reduces the amount of I/O needed to access the file as it doesn't have to be fetched in sections and reassembled.
Morin likens the effect to managing rush hour traffic, "It's like ensuring that every car has the maximum number of occupants so you use fewer vehicles to move the same number of people. With Diskeeper 15 Server you need fewer I/O cycles to access a file".
You can find more information about Diskeeper Server on the Condusiv website.
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