Have you added or thought about adding a SAN solution to your customer’s existing systems? Read the following from a recent white paper:

“SAN defragmenting offers an alternative to costly hardware costs incurred by adding drives. Why? While SANs offer extremely efficient and high-performing data storage, it is not their job to address file system-level fragmentation. No matter how efficient data retrieval can be, and how much physical disk limitations can be mitigated, the added overhead on the operating system retrieving the file is beyond the scope of SAN technology, and is impacted by file fragmentation.

How are companies addressing this? Some simply ignore the issue, believing that because of the inherently high performance of SANs, defragmenting offers little or no benefit.

Others assume that SAN or virtualization vendors address the issue with features within their offerings. However, while some SAN vendors offer tools that work within their proprietary SAN file systems, none of these tools address local disk file fragmentation.

These wrong assumptions cause many to simply ignore the problem – a tactic that is not an option in today’s business environment. Companies need to defragment their SAN to achieve a noticeable improvement in system performance.”

And read the following SAN testimonial:

“Do I consider Diskeeper a vital tool on our network? Without a doubt.

I have been in situations in years past where large SAN arrays failed due to file system corruption. Once at that point, recovering info from the actual units is pointless and all you can do is pray that the Backup Administrators did their job. Since those times I have made it a point to ensure that the file system fragmentation is kept to a minimum, with the added bonus of being able to detect initial corruption earlier.

After running Diskeeper on various servers in multiple configurations, I never had to worry about file system performance degradation. That in itself makes the product worthwhile. It is also why I make sure that we renew our licenses each year.

Sometimes the hallmark of a software is how often you use it. With Diskeeper, its hallmark is that it does a fantastic job after setting it once and letting Diskeeper do what it does best, without further user interaction.”

Shem Boduch
Sr. System & Network Administrator
University of Chicago

Need  a copy of the white paper? Additional testimonials? Let me know. I’ll get them to you.

-Anthony

Have you received your Windows 7 Launch Party Pack yet? Have you sent out the invites? Prepped the guacamole?

There’s not much time left as Thursday, November 22 is the big day. Will you be upgrading your client’s machines (from XP or Vista) to the latest operating system or are you going to perform a “clean” install? I’ve spoken with a number of VAR’s and they’ve indicated a clean install is their preferred method. What’s yours?

Many VAR’s have indicated a slow and steady rollout with some of their customers opting to finally pull the trigger and purchase new pre-installed systems.

And the question I’m asked, “what about Diskeeper… will it work with Windows 7?” is an easy one to answer.

Yes.

Diskeeper 2009 and HyperFast fully support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2, and have since we released them back in December 2008. V-locity (our Hyper-V solution), also fully supports the new Windows platforms.

So pace yourselves with the chips and champagne. And remember to install Diskeeper.

Anthony

Have you recently added extra storage capacity to your clients systems? A 1-terabyte drive is quickly becoming the defacto standard in new or replacement installs. While your clients may think that they’ll never be able to use all that space, within a short period of time, you’re getting a call to “fix” their “slow to a crawl” system and you find that they’ve filled the drive with important “stuff”, leaving 1% free space for you to work with.

LIMITED SPACE IMPEDES PERFORMANCE RECOVERY

Volumes with limited free space are the ones most in need of defragmentation. Most defrag solutions simply cannot operate efficiently in these conditions. Diskeeper can effectively defrag your clients drives with as little as 1% available space.

Pretty remarkable.

-Anthony

You know you’re in Las Vegas by the flashing lights and non-stop bells and whistles of the slot machines along with the massive scale of buffet offerings.

You know you’re at the Riviera when, as you exit the elevator, you’re given a choice; go right and you’re getting married at the chapel. Go left, you’re getting tattooed.

Left it was -

Jim Locke and the SMBTN boys and girl were on hand and included our promotional materials on their exhibit table. We were also part of their raffle, offering a copy of Diskeeper 2010 (when it becomes available) to a lucky winner.

While Managed Services remained a focus of many of the sessions, VoIP and Social Media solutions were definitely the “next thing” buzz of the show.

And Diskeeper 2010 was teased into every conversation. “When can I get my hands on a copy?” you may ask.

The clock is ticking.

-Anthony

www.smbnation.com

www.la-itgirl.com

www.smbtn.org

TechData brought its traveling Software Solutions roadshow to St. Louis (September17^th-18^th).

Part TechData infomercial, part relationship builder for vendors and VARs, the event is quick-paced and chock full of sessions.

Vendors APC, Sony, Toshiba sponsored the opening luncheon, and after the opening welcome from Murray Wright, TechData’s Senior Vice President of Sales we were treated to “Comedian of the Year” Buzz Sutherland. I knew he was going to be funny because his first name is “Buzz”.

Microsoft, Novell and Symantec (Gold member sponsors) were on hand to speak about new opportunities and get the crowd motivated.

TechData makes sure that during the breaks we are properly fed with sugary snacks and caffeine. Apple slices on a stick dipped in chocolate (a local treat), potato chips of various flavors and power bars (for the healthconscience) kept the attendees happy and ready for the next session.

For the Roundtable session I met with groups of 5-10 attendees for approximately 10 minutes as they rotated from table to table. Call it “tech speed dating”. It’s a good opportunity to meet new people and tease them with just enough information to get them to continue the conversation later. And the attendees received gift cards just for showing up!

At the Technology Showcase (also called the exhibit hall) I had the chance to speak in depth with number of new VAR’s overlunch. I’m still surprised when a VAR comes up to the booth and asks, “What does Diskeeper do?” Meeting with existing customers is great, creating new VAR relationships is one of the reasons we continue to participate and attend. You never know who you are going to meet and what you’re going to learn. 

Jimmy J. Powell,

Network Administrator,

City of Rockwall 

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! 

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

“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    

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.

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 .

Last week we were in New Orleans at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference.

Diskeeper Corporation staff met with numerous Microsoft PMs and executives regarding existing and future partnership opportunities. Derek De Vette, who overseas partner relations here at Diskeeper Coporation, met with Becky Lymberis, Senior Marketing Manager, Solutions Marketing. With Small Business Servers (SBS) often tasked to do just about everything under the sun for smaller businesses, they tend to need a great deal of advanced care and maintenance. Becky had this to say about Diskeeper on the Microsoft Facebook site:  

“Diskeeper 2009 defrag products increase the productivity of the workplace and keep business systems always running at their maximum peak performance. Diskeeper is a great application for Small Business Server because it helps prevent crashes, slowdowns and sluggishness, extending the life and enhancing performance of the server—helping small businesses to be more productive. Everyone should check out this solution. It’s one of the most cost effective ways to enhance the performance of your customer’s servers.”

Find it here: http://www.facebook.com/WindowsSBS

Here is a cool success story I thought I'd share:

"We find Diskeeper to be vital and we use it for our virtual servers (VMware) as well.  We redirect our user desktops and My Documents folders to network shares and have found the response times improved quite a bit after defragging the virtual server.   We also found that it cuts the time needed to perform a P2V (convert physical machines to virtual) by about 90% if the physical server is defragged beforehand.  Case in point, we had a few physical Citrix servers that simply did not want to P2V but simply worked as expected after defrag and very quickly. Thank you Diskeeper."

Turner Padget Graham and Laney, http://www.turnerpadget.com/

We are following suit with Microsoft, which is offering an additional complimentary license of Windows XP for users of high end Windows 7 editions. That "feature" is called XP Mode. All of our current and future products (Diskeeper, HyperFast, Undelete) will include an allowance to install a second instance of that licensed software in that XP Mode (virtual Windows XP operating system) as well. We are updating our EULA to "officially" note this, but you heard it hear "officially" as well.

If you are using the Windows 7 RC you can download the XP Mode feature and other requirements to run it here.

Find out (a little bit) more here at Microsoft's Virtualization Partner site.