Efficient Defrag: Doing More With Less

Delivering more and better results with less resources and lower cost is no longer a “nice-to-have”; it is an operating expectation. And while defrag is certainly an essential maintenance activity for any site, some solutions are far more efficient than others.

Traditional approaches to resolving fragmentation focused on eliminating the many incontiguous pieces of files and free space randomly scattered across disks. This required the defrag process to become faster and faster as increased usage at a site of any size accelerates the rate of fragmentation.

Because of this, most outmoded defrag programs resorted to hasty processes that desperately attempted to stay ahead of the fragmentation curve. The emphasis was to defrag faster than usage would fragment the disks, all in the hopes of breaking even with “zero fragments” by the end of the production day.

Unfortunately, that approach proved to be resource-intensive, as it stressed speed while targeting all fragmentation, and with present day recessionary demands of higher production despite dwindling resources it soon became obvious that a more elegant and resource-conscious defrag solution was necessary.

A breakthrough on this occurred with the realization that not all fragmentation is alike: it is not all of monotone importance. In other words, is access to every file on the disk equally important?

Even in a large site with thousands of machines and as many users, there are some file types and indeed even some files that get accessed and modified much more than others, and therein lies considerable room for improved efficiency.

Rather than being in a perpetual, desperate all-out race with fragmentation, a better solution would identify and defrag the more heavily used files first, making their availability in a contiguous state for future access a priority. Thus, by eliminating frantic efforts to “attain zero fragments at any cost”, peak performance can be efficiently attained with minimal resource waste.

This breakthrough technology, now exclusively available in Diskeeper® 2011 data performance software, is known as “Efficient Mode”. Its resource-friendly algorithm is smart enough to detect problematic fragmentation which is then designated for priority handling.

Efficient Mode results in much less I/O activity during the defrag process while restoring and maintaining superlative performance for users and applications, prompting Angela McCord, of LexJet to state:

“Diskeeper 2011 is far ahead of any other defrag software. Servers are more reliable, backup times are reduced drastically and desktops run more efficiently. Diskeeper is a MUST!”

While using Efficient Mode to deal with prioritized, problematic fragmentation, additional innovations are employed to fully optimize the site, quickly achieving a state of unparalleled performance in the classic Diskeeper “Set It And Forget It ®” style.

"Having Diskeeper on our Servers and PCs keeps them working optimally with no work required on my part” reports Brian Le Flem, IT Manager, Business in the Community in Belfast, Ireland. "Optimized systems with no extra work for IT Staff? That’s a no-brainer for any company.”

Efficient maximal site optimization requires the use of defrag solutions that identify and prioritize which fragmentation factually affects site performance and then intelligently resolve it. This strategy is simply more efficient than outdated, myopic “defrag-everything-in-sight” paradigms that waste resources in a monotone attempt to obliterate all fragmentation regardless of cost.