We're looking for some current Diskeeper customers that are interested in getting a first look at a new technology breakthrough. The preview will start in a few weeks and we have a few openings left that we need to fill.

We're eager to get this new technology on the market so this Sneak Peek Preview program will start and finish all within one week!

If you are a current customer and are interested and able to install, evaluate and then comment (fill out a 5 minute online survey) on this software, all within a one week period, simply fill-out a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) located here.

Fax the signed NDA to:
Fax: 818-252-5514

Please add the following to the Fax cover page:
Attn: Field Test Administrator/Sneak Peek Preview

Alternatively you can email the signed NDA (scan in the pages with your signature) to our Field Test administrator. Please add "Sneak Peek Field Test" in the subject line.

I found this Diskeeper Log interesting. One of our Account Managers recently installed voice recognition/dictation software (on August 19). If you follow the daily log reports, you can see the dramatic difference in the daily number of fragments eliminated. Diskeeper went from averaging 3000 fragments eliminated per day to 15,000!

Eliminating fragmentation to get the expected performance from voice recognition software programs is well documented. Here is one good report on the subject.

Our Executive Vice President had a 3-year old Dell computer that had probably never been defragmented.  It had only 512MB of RAM and when I worked on it, it was EXTREMELY slow.  To open up MS Word had to take 10-15 seconds or more.   I installed Diskeeper Professional and let him know what I did to speed up his PC.  Much to my surprise he called me back a day later and thanked me for speeding up his PC.  He said it was quicker and the applications he opened were more responsive.   I hung up the phone in amazement. Usually the only time a user calls is when they have a problem, not to tell you how well something is working.  Obviously Diskeeper made quite an impact on him and his PC! 

I am enjoying V-locity. It has made a difference in performance, especially with some of my virtual machines.

One major feature I like is the built-in functionality to compact the VHD files. My hard drive was running low on space, but I knew my virtual machines weren’t using that much and V-locity told me which virtual hard drives to compact. I did that and it freed up a lot of space.  

We are running NextGen HER (Electronic Medical Records ) which generates hundreds of files daily, but we don’t have to worry because every night V-locity puts them in their place! The speed of our virtual guests and hosts and increased dramatically as well as our biggest file server that serves 170 users.  I also like how unobtrusive V-locity is… I don’t even notice that it is there really. I am excited to see Diskeeper [Corporation] on the cutting edge! 

Chris G., System Administrator, Northwest Human Services

Advanced copies of Karl’s new book can be purchased at www.networkmigrationworkbook.com He also has a popular SMB blog at http://blog.smallbizthoughts.com

We posted a press release today regarding a new software innovation called HyperBoot(tm). This is a major R&D project we've been working on for some time. HyperBoot is designed to do one thing - boot up (cold boot) an HDD-based Windows system in record time. The performance results of our development effort on this project are far better than we expected going in.  

We're very excited to begin our new HyperBoot technology partnerships with netbook pioneer ASUS. Initially this arrangement will cover all ASUS netbooks and laptops running Windows XP. We've also seen overwhelming interest from many more global OEM's for this new technology.

Additional HyperBoot variations support Windows 7 systems and other storage media. As you can imagine, the hardware and software contribute significantly to the boot up peformance of a given computer. That said, we've seen Win7 platforms that, after adding HyperBoot to it, boot in under 15 seconds.

More is coming...

More future GUI charts with the "colonel's secret recipe" scratched out: 

Storage Area Networks (SANs) are becoming increasingly more common. A few years ago "SAN" was an acronym that rarely made it out of the lexicon of IT Storage Admins at 1000s+ employee multinationals. In more recent years the SAN IHV/ISVs have greatly simplified and reduced the installation, maintenance, technical effort, and acquisition costs. It's increasingly more common to see SANs in medium sized businesses. Many SAN providers have even offered targeted "mid-range" solutions often for those mid-sized organizations. EMC is one such vendor that targets just such a solution with their Clariion product line.

Microsoft has also been at the forefront of advancements in data storage centralization. Technologies like Storport (introduced in Windows Server 2003), iSCSI software initiator, multipath I/O storage stack, and more.

A great deal of innovative software from Microsoft and SAN vendors make the whole system work.

An important point to be aware of is where in the whole computer system, the SAN "plugs" in. A SAN is, in essence, a replacement for a single disk. In the Windows I/O storage stack a SAN solution replaces the disk driver (disk.sys), with its own drivers. Eventually data must reside on a physical storage device of some kind, so any request to read or write data will have to go through this disk driver, or SAN replacement thereof. However, before the I/O request gets to this lower level it goes through a local disk file system. When talking about Windows in a SAN, that local disk file system is pretty much always going to be NTFS. Fragmentation as Windows sees it and cares (same for Diskeeper), is at NTFS. So, if files are fragmented as NTFS sees it, the local disk file system has to send a great deal more I/O traffic into the SAN, causing the SAN to do more work that it should.

We have a very thorough white paper that covers defragmenting SAN. It also includes Best Practices for Diskeeper. Check it out here.

Even SAN vendors recommend defragmenting Windows. EMC includes a paragraph about the need for their Clariion family of products in a white paper here. In it (pg. 5) it says:

The interesting part is they also note the SAN file system solutions they offer are NOT designed to handle NTFS fragmentation, and that they recommend to defragment that "local disk" file system. When we here at Diskeeper talk about the need to defrag SAN attached systems, were talking about doing what we always have done - defragging NTFS in Windows (from Windows). That is an important point as SANs also use a file system to organize data. Diskeeper, nor Windows defrag addresses this. "If" defrag of some kind is needed in this SAN file system it is handled by the SAN vendor - you can check with their support staff on that subject. Defragmenting NTFS and defrag of SAN file systems are two completely different subjects and should not be confused.

Even more reading:

Ziff Davis Enterprise (from the same parent company of eWeek) just released a paper on defragmenting SANs, including benefits and covering some considerations as well. You can read that here.

In summary, even with the tremendous amount of technology that has gone into SANs over the past decade, defragmenting SANs is still just as vital as defragmenting DAS (direct attached storage).

“Diskeeper is vital; it helps our business with what we consider preventative maintenance.  We also feel that this software keeps our server and our server apps running smoothly and efficiently as we have 50 users who require simultaneous access to our data for operation of our facilities.  I run Diskeeper on my primary ERP server which is our business critical application.  We saw within the first day, that previous delays in processing data had decreased.  Our current ERP, called Eagle, was installed and implemented about 2.5 years ago and is made by a company called DMS (now owned by AFS).  This server is one of four we run Diskeeper on.  Since we are food warehousing company, we chose an application that was built specifically for our industry.  Also as we are a company that ships and processes orders 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, being able to run at optimal performance is always crucial for us. “  

Jamison Moklak

Information Technology

Julius Silvert, Philadelphia, PA    

On a humorous note: I just returned from CompTIA’s Breakaway Conference in Vegas (Computing Technical Industry Association). While there, they published the results of a membership survey question which asked, “What is the most annoying industry buzzword?”

The results were as follows:

1.       Value prop

2.       Paradigm shift

I would be amazed to see what would come up if they asked for the most annoying acronyms! Any takers?

Early next week we'll publish a new white paper that covers 21 technical points to consider when evaluating a disk optimization solution. While it is focused on IT professionals evaluating Diskeeper for business desktops/laptops, many of the points apply to all users. Test results regarding one such universal consideration is provided below:

Often overlooked, but just as significant as file fragmentation, is free space fragmentation. Fragmented free space will inevitably increase the likelihood and degree of fragmentation of data and system files. Diskeeper has advanced solutions to consolidate space into a small handful of very large segments in order to improve future file-write performance.

Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) in Vista provides no option to consolidate file system free space. While tests demonstrate the number of free space segments is reduced after using WDD, a high number (7403 fragments) remain and the average free space segment size increases marginally.  Rather than increasing the size of the largest free space segment, (desirable) the free space segment was reduced from ~39GB to ~10GB.

Compared to the Windows 7 Disk Defragmenter, Diskeeper provided far superior results, eliminating free space fragmentation as a performance issue. Diskeeper grouped free space segments so as to create a much larger average size (measured in the GB) and created a 33+ GB ‘largest’ chunk size.  

While a free space defragmentation command line option has been introduced in Windows 7, test results show free space is less effectively defragmented than in the default mode. 

WDD provides a few command line parameters which allow it to apply different algorithms, each intended to solve fragmentation in various environments; such as ‘run free space consolidation mode.’ Diskeeper includes various, and numerous, defragmentation algorithms. However, at the core of the Diskeeper program is an advanced logic controller that, with a focus on how to best restore file system performance, automatically selects a special algorithm for a particular environment. There is never a need to manually analyze and make administrative decisions and then adjust operational parameters to run a different type of defrag task. If free space fragmentation is a performance issue, Diskeeper dynamically recognizes this and solves the problem without administrative intervention.

In summary, only Diskeeper provides a solution to consolidate free space, thereby preventing file-write performance degradation for future write activity on a given volume.

Here is a sample screenshot from an upcoming new Diskeeper release:

This graph works like the InvisiTasking graph (updates a measurement every second), but I can't tell you what it's measuring just yet (had to scratch that part out).

You won't have to wait much longer though...

When installing Diskeeper, many users will schedule a boot-time defragmentation immediately after running the product. Even though a boot-time fragmentation is safe, in many instances, this is not necessary and a boot-time defragmentation will require the computer to be restarted to complete the process.  A user should first determine if performing a boot-time defragmentation is necessary. (A person would not go to the car dealer to get an oil change if the oil in his car was changed yesterday.)

It is recommended to perform a boot-time defragmentation if the paging file or Master File Table (MFT ) becomes highly fragmented.  Information on the fragmentation of the paging file and MFT can be found in the Diskeeper Job Report.

If the number of fragments of the paging file and MFT are 5 or less, there is no need to perform a boot-time defragmentation. Please note that it is recommended to run Diskeeper in automatic mode. When Diskeeper is run in automatic mode, Diskeeper incorporates a technology called Frag Shield which helps keep your MFT and paging files from becoming fragmented in the future .