Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Scheduled vs. automatic defrag: an analogy

Mumbai, India (BUSINESS WIRE) - Here's a familiar scene: you get in your car to go to work and take off in a rush, knowing you're running late. A short time into your drive you notice your fuel gauge, empty, of course. You turn into a gas station, wait your turn and by the time you finally fill your tank, fifteen minutes have passed. No matter what, you're going to be late now.

Let's relate this familiar scene to scheduled defragmentation. By a certain time each night, a system is running slower than normal, indicating levels of file fragmentation have risen considerably since the last scheduled defrag. Because the system is available to users at all hours, including those in other time zones, this performance degradation affects everyone accessing file data. Fragmentation builds and the computer slows to a halt. This means anyone waiting for data could be late as they try to complete their task.

Back to the car analogy; what if there was an automatic device you could attach to your vehicle to refuel it while driving? You wouldn't have been late that morning, and you'd probably save time each week. Your car would run at peak performance all the time, never required to stop and get gas. Every time you needed to get somewhere you could just start the engine and go.

In the computer world, an automatic defragmenter - one which requires no scheduling and runs whenever possible using only idle resources - would have the same affect on servers and workstations. Performance would always be maintained, and there would never be a time each night when performance is drastically affected. In the same way as the car, any user could just log in and go.

The problem is scheduled defragmentation has been outmoded. In today's vastly larger file sizes and disk capacities, fragmentation builds faster than ever -- and it builds in between those scheduled defrag runs, continuing to slow performance. Because a "time when users aren't on the system" has become obsolete due to globalization and other factors, the defragmenter cannot run without negatively affecting users.

A fully automatic defragmentation solution addresses these shortcomings, being the best solution for today's computing environment. While we don't have an automatic refueling solution for your car, there is, fortunately, one for defragmenting your computer system.

Boyers MarketingBruce Boyers, 818-637-2625 beboyers@earthlink.net

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