BURBANK, CA–( EMWNews – April 1, 2008) – It’s a well-known fact that file fragmentation

seriously affects performance. The more files are broken up into fragments,

the worse the performance, to the point that system reliability can be

affected with hangs and even crashes. But many may not be aware of the cost

savings that defragmentation can

bring — both short- and long-term. Also, because many sites address

fragmentation with scheduled solutions, they may not be aware that, with

today’s computing environments, scheduled solutions are no longer providing

the performance benefits — and therefore the cost benefits — that they

once might have, and that more effective solutions are likely in order for

their sites.

In the short term, defragmentation saves cost and provides ROI on key

elements such as IT hours and overtime spent on help desk calls due to slow

performance and reliability problems. It also cuts access time and reduces

the time per day every employee has to wait for data.

In the longer term, defragmentation is a step similar to that American

Airlines took years ago

— they saved $40,000 per year by removing one olive per salad served to

their First Class passengers. For a relatively small investment,

defragmentation trims costs by making the overall company far more

efficient through the system-wide performance optimization. Defragmentation

also lengthens the lives of hard drives, thereby reducing a corporation’s

yearly hardware budget.

In these scenarios, however, we are speaking of “defragmentation” in the

ideal; meaning, the defragmentation technology is performing effectively

and maximizing performance. Today, however, scheduled defragmentation — for many years the

traditional method — is no longer keeping pace with today’s frantic rates

of fragmentation. Much larger files and greatly expanded disk capacities

have meant that fragmentation continues to build between scheduled runs,

and with very large drives fragmentation may not be addressed at all.

Additionally, the nights and weekends previously available to schedule

defragmentation runs with no negative performance on users have all but

disappeared due to many sites running 24X7.

Overtime IT hours are being spent in an ever-challenging effort to schedule

defragmentation runs where they will cause the least trouble, and are also

still probably having to be spent handling help desk calls because

performance is still suffering.

Today, the only real effective solution to bring short- and long-term cost

savings to companies is a completely automatic solution, one that runs

whenever idle system resources are available so that defragmentation is consistent and

performance is maximized. Users are never negatively affected by

defragmentation. And all those IT hours lost to scheduling defragmentation

and still handling complaints of slow performance are regained.