Defragmentation's Hidden Value for the Enterprise

This IDC White Paper looks at the savings and benefits that system software and disk defragmentation can provide to customers. It also examines the savings that were achieved by three enterprise customers using a simple model over one year. These customers were selected by Diskeeper for analysis by IDC.

The Impact of Disk Fragmentation

While there is little dispute among IT professionals regarding the impact of disk fragmentation on system performance, no independent guidelines exist to recommend the frequency of defragmentation across an infrastructure. Some IT professionals use defragmentation as a measure of last resort, defragmenting only after system performance has sufficiently degraded to make its impact directly noticeable to users. Others proactively schedule disk defragmentation regularly, with the intent of eliminating the gradual accumulation of fragmented files.

Virtualization and Disk Performance

Depending on your perspective, virtualization’s purpose is to afford divergence and convergence. It affords the division of logical objects that should be separated, and/or the consolidation of objects that should be grouped together. The technology’s recent explosion coincides with the trend of consolidating systems on to fewer, but more powerful hardware. With more robust hardware, consolidation makes cost-effective sense. And given consolidation for the purpose of reduced management overhead and more efficient hardware utilization, virtualization makes a great deal of sense.

Stand Guard Against Accidental File Erasure

The mathematics of accidental file erasure is alarming.A PC user is likely to spend an average of one hour in a frantic effort to recover the file (or files, or an entire directory) before turning to the help desk. Just two occurrences per day – a conservative estimate for a corporate environment – translates to a minimum annual productivity loss of 520 hours, nearly 14 40-hour weeks.Office colleagues, in their attempts to help, add to lost productivity and are more likely to hurt, not help, any chance of success.

Deducing the Effects of File System Performance on System Reliability

Resolving issues with file system performance include numerous solutions, primarily hardware related, from use of faster disks, a greater number of disks, distributed storage, SANs, and on the bleeding edge extreme, petabyte-worthy technologies such as cluster file systems. It can also lead to “workaround” handlings such as reinstalling software, re-imaging of hard drives, replacement of hardware, all of which incur overwork on the administrative end. It forces IT to work reactively on problems, increasing IT costs and adversely affects user productivity due to unacceptable levels of downtime.

Self-Tuning Disk Drives Eliminate Performance

Despite all the advances of recent times, the disk remains the weak link. And with the ongoing explosion in data storage as well as the massive size of modern disks, that link is growing steadily weaker. As a result, fragmentation exerts a severe toll on enterprise performance and reliability, one that cannot be remedied by manual defragmentation.

Is Real-Time Defragmentation Needed in Today's Environment?

In today’s environment of bigger disks storing not only larger files but more files than ever before, the effects of fragmentation worsen markedly with each day’s use. To keep up with same-day performance degradation, disks must be defragmented in real-time.