BURBANK, CA–( EMWNews – April 8, 2008) – Two prime objectives when it comes to computing

are protection and integrity of data, and improving system throughput and

performance. Many millions — if not billions — of dollars have been spent

in the pursuit of both these goals. One major breakthrough for both of them

has been RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology, and defrag is of vital assistance to this

technology.

For data protection and integrity, RAID provides for data to be written

redundantly so that if one physical drive fails that data is still fully

accessible and recoverable. This functionality also does much to increase

performance; since the I/O load is across several disks instead of just

one, retrieval is faster. An operating system can even perform simultaneous

seeks on more than one disk and have simultaneous reads or writes

occurring.

This substantial leap in technology originally led some to conclude that

defragmentation was not needed with RAID — a conclusion that has since

been thoroughly disproved. The file system “sees” the data in a RAID set as

one virtual volume and performs its reads and writes accordingly. If data

on the physical disks is fragmented, it will also appear as fragmented in

the virtual volume and will take longer to retrieve in ratio to the number

of fragments per file. Additionally, RAID necessitates several extra steps

when reading or writing a file — RAID hardware/software must process any

file request and determine to which physical member to direct the I/O

request — so a RAID system must work that much harder when fragmentation

exists. The result is that the performance benefit is negated to the degree

that files are fragmented.

A fully automatic defrag solution

such as Diskeeper® sees the RAID environment just as the file system

does. That is, it defragments the logical drive, improving the speed and

performance of a RAID environment by eliminating wasteful and unnecessary

I/Os. More system time can be dedicated to doing real useful work for the

users and applications. Diskeeper works invisibly in the background to keep

a RAID set consistently defragmented, utilizing idle resources whenever

they are available. Performance is not negatively impacted by the defrag process, and scheduling is

never required.

Diskeeper is a perfect complement to RAID, allowing its data integrity and

performance benefits to be fully realized.