10.10.00
Hello all, today we have a special NetworkNewz for you. I, myself,
know the importance of defragmenting a hard disk. You would not
believe the increase in performance you can achieve by performing
this simple task for your servers and clients. That's why in today's
special issue I have included an article that can explain why you
should defragment your hard disks.
Patrick Stoddard
NetworkNewz Editor
Remote disk defragmentation can save big bucks, and help delay
hardware upgrades.
Many network executives are too busy with the complexities of
managing their network to pay much attention to tactical matters
such as disk performance. That could be a costly mistake.
"Corporations are losing as much as $50 billion per year as a result
of not defragmenting every server and workstation on the network,"
says Steve Widen, director of storage software research at IDC in
Framingham, Mass.
IDC recommends deploying defragmentation software on Windows desktops
and servers to avoid lengthy waits for file access, reboots lasting
an eternity, hours added to backups and even corruption of data.
Granted, you can't always link system slowdowns to fragmented disk
drives. There could be a slow processor, not enough memory or even an
old device driver. But where I/O pace or back-up speed has grown more
sluggish over time, fragmentation is the likely culprit.
For instance, United Parcel Service (UPS) deploys Executive
Software's Diskeeper across a network that spans hundreds of
servers.
"Defragmentation makes data access much faster and prevents
degradation of system performance," says David Zhao, product manager
in the UPS distributed systems services division in Atlanta,
responsible for Windows NT design and infrastructure.
"Before, it was hard to tell between a network slowdown and a problem
caused by poor server disk performance. As defragmentation removes
disk performance slowdowns from the equation, network troubleshooting
is much easier," Zhao says.
Some argue that you don't need to worry about defragmentation when
you have file-based cache that bypasses disk access on commonly used
files.
"Since memory access is at least 100 times faster than disk access,
caching can significantly reduce disk I/O traffic and mitigate or
possibly eliminate the second-order effects of file fragmentation,"
says Keith Walls, chief architect for InSoft Limited, a Hudson, N.H.,
consulting and development firm. However, the National Software
Testing Lab, a software performance testing firm in Conshohocken,
Pa., found that even with caching, slowdowns from disk fragmentation
were far from eliminated. During testing of workstations and servers
equipped with 128M bytes of memory, both performed significantly
better after defragmentation.
Throw hardware at the problem
Many network administrators consider regular system upgrades and
hardware innovation sufficient to maximize network performance.
"Hardware development is managing to stay one step ahead of storage
demands," says Simon Perry, vice president of security solutions at
Computer Associates. "As most corporations change hardware every two
or three years, they are largely unconcerned about fragmentation."
He notes that defragmentation technology has achieved only a 10% to
15% penetration into the corporate NT market so far, and that it
lacks a compelling event such as the Melissa virus to make it a topic
of discussion at the boardroom level.
