“The tagline of our company is ‘Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies,’ and that’s really what we focus on—innovating technologies that really enhance and maximize performance and reliability of systems,” Materie says. “HyperBoot and Diskeeper innovations just in these products alone are really key to the company.”

The V-locity Revolution

Few would disagree that data centers have changed pretty dramatically in the past four or five years. Materie points out that, in the past, every server was a single box with its own set of disks using one operating system. Relatively few SMEs ran true 24/7 environments, and so scheduling defragmentation at 11 p.m. was not a big deal.

Today, virtualization has become almost ubiquitous, as SME data centers increasingly must administer exponentially larger data and application loads. “You have shared disks and shared storage across either multiple servers connected into a SAN, multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a server, or multiple VMs on a server connected into a SAN,” says Materie. “A lot more stress is put on the disks, which means fragmentation actually becomes much more of an issue. With these new environments, defragmentation that worked four or five years ago doesn’t apply anymore.”

Given that a data center may have 10 VMs in one physical box, scheduling defragmentation becomes more problematic. “You’d have to stagger these schedules so that they don’t bump into one another [and] don’t defrag while the system is in use and people need to access the storage,” says Materie.

Diskeeper has responded to this migration toward virtualization by developing V-locity, a new solution targeted toward these virtual environments. V-locity is a virtual-specific application that performs the same sort of defragmenting and other functions on Hyper-V virtual machines that Diskeeper handles on physical ones.

“V-locity has a smart agent that sits at the host platform and communicates with an agent that is installed in each of the guest virtual machines,” Materie explains. “They’re able to coordinate when resources are available so that they never bump into another machine doing defragmentation or a user just doing productive work within one of those operating systems.”

Fixing A Problem That Is Always There

Materie says that Diskeeper software fixes fragmentation, a problem that is always present no matter what type of environment you have running. Some of the ramifications of having fragmentation are slow performance, lower productivity, and increased help desk traffic. “Defragmentation is one of the top 10 things to do when somebody calls in to complain that something is wrong with [his or her] system,” Materie says.

Oftentimes, IT makes the mistake of throwing more hardware, such as more hard drives or SAN equipment, at what is basically a software problem. “IT departments find themselves caught up in much more expensive Band-Aid solutions rather than fixing the cure. For the price of a hard drive, you get the price of the [Diskeeper] software,” Materie says.

An upcoming version of Diskeeper will include a new technology that prevents up to 85% of disk fragmentation from occurring in the first place. “It’s a proactive solution. In other words, you don’t have to defrag after the fact,” Materie says.

In addition to Diskeeper 2009 and V-locity, Diskeeper has also released a solution called HyperFast that optimizes SSDs (solid-state drives), which are increasingly being used in laptops and netbooks. "SSDs are typically not as good at random write performance. One reason for that is if you have free-space fragmentation on the drive, it will chop up a sequential write across free spaces in the file systems and pass multiple random I/O to the the SSD. This causes a performance drop and slower write performance," Materie explains.

HyperFast works both by automatically eliminating free-space fragmentation and by reducing the aggregate erase-write cycles that an SSD would experience during normal usage. Not only does this lead to faster performance, it dramatically increases the lifespan of the SSD.

The variety of defragmentation products that Diskeeper provides is a boon for the company itself as well as its users. “It’s great because if defragmentation was just a single spinning disk attached to the computer, we probably would have gotten bored a long time ago,” Materie says.

by Robyn Weisman