File Fragmentation Drastically Affects the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a Computer System

BURBANK, CA–(EMWNews – July 15, 2008) – Figuring computer system Total Cost of

Ownership (TCO) can be a tricky business. In addition to the equipment

itself there must be added the cost of installed software, programming

hours for any homegrown applications, support subscriptions, upgrades and

patches and the cost of system maintenance. Part of this maintenance is the

warding off of threats to system operation such as viruses and malware —

and file fragmentation. And the threat of file fragmentation must be met

with the right defrag technology.

File fragmentation — the splitting of files into multiple pieces in order

to fully utilize disk space — affects TCO in numerous ways. The first of

these is, of course, slow system performance, which in serious

fragmentation situations can be quite drastic. Performance can not only be

slowed down, it can even be halted altogether. The amount of IT department

hours spent in an effort to address these performance problems can quickly

mount, especially when the true culprit has not been isolated, and TCO

climbs radically.

Another cost that can be directly traced to fragmentation is that of help

desk calls. A help desk call means that a valuable IT employee must stop

whatever he or she is doing and immediately assist a user. Performance is a

top item for help desk calls, and a prime suspect in performance troubles

is fragmentation.

A third way that fragmentation impacts TCO is in the toll on hard drives.

Because it requires greatly increased I/O traffic to pull together all the

fragments of a file, a hard drive takes more than expected punishment.

Expected disk drive life — figured into TCO — can be shorted by a third

or even by half.

Interestingly, many sites have crossed fragmentation off their lists of

performance threats due to the implementation of scheduled defragmentation.

But a closer analysis will reveal that scheduled defrag — now outmoded — is allowing

fragmentation to still have a negative affect on TCO. Because file sizes

and disk capacities have grown so dramatically, fragmentation continues to

build in between scheduled defrag runs. And in the case of very large

disks, defrag may not be occurring

at all.

Scheduled defrag is also having a

negative impact on TCO through the amount of IT hours it takes to analyze

and schedule it.

Currently the only truly cost-effective defragmenter is the completely

automatic solution provided by Diskeeper® Corporation. Utilizing a

proprietary technology called InvisiTasking™, Diskeeper defragments

invisibly, in the background, whenever otherwise-idle resources are

available. Performance is always maintained at maximum. And since

scheduling is not required at all, precious IT hours can be spent on

higher-priority projects.

Diskeeper implemented across an entire enterprise means that performance,

help desk calls, hard drive life and IT hours are once again restored to

their rightful places and cost-effectiveness in the TCO of a computer

system.