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

It's time for SMB Nation, with Harry Brelsford moving the caravan of VAR's to Las Vegas after 6 years in Seattle and its environs.

This year's event will focus on Windows 7, the impact of social media, SMB VoIP and whatever else comes up during the impromptu hallway meetings that frequently occur.

Will there be a server build party? The real question is; how can you call it a party without a server build?

Jim Locke and the SMBTN group will be on hand and are  sponsoring a couple of pre-day (Friday, Oct 1) training certification events for Trend Micro and Speakeasy.

And we'll be on hand hinting and nudging our upcoming release, Diskeeper 2010. We're planning on shaking things up with this one. Here's something to chew on, "Diskeeper 2010 addresses the cause of fragmentation and prevents up to 85% and more of the fragmentation that has long plagued every hard disk. This technology is unavailable anywhere else, and nothing else comes close." 

Want to find out more? Come see me at the show. I'll be holding the torque wrench during the server build.

Anthony

• acrea@diskeeper.com
• www.twitter.com/diskeeper
• Harry’s blog
• SMBTN blog

We are running Diskeeper on three of our production Terminal Servers. After running the product on these heavily fragmented systems, they seem to have cleared most all of our lag issues related to fragmentation.  I find that Diskeeper’s Automatic Defrag is truly set it and forget it. I do periodically check on it to make sure that it is indeed keeping things cleaned up. I have received no complaints from users after installing Diskeeper as it stays seamlessly out of the way of active work being done on the servers.  Performance has definitely increased as a result of installing Diskeeper on our production Terminal servers.  

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! 

Tony Laird, United Fire GroupCedar Rapids, IA 

 

 

Anyone can perform a network migration WITH downtime. WITHOUT downtime is another story.  If you’d like to find out how, check out The Network Migration Workbook: Zero Downtime Migration Strategies for Microsoft Networks by prominent Reseller and technical author, Karl Palachuk. Amongst the best practices in use is the full implementation of Diskeeper.

“We maintain many networks and knowing Diskeeper has our back gives us peace of mind. Our installation checklist is really only comprised of monitoring the installation while the technician eats a pastry, then verifying that a few default settings. It is set-it-and-forget-it at its best.   We use and have recommend Diskeeper exclusively for over 15 years. We know it is the best of breed tool for maintaining optimal drive performance and health on all of our client servers and workstations.” -Karl Palachuck 

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...

Great customer success:

“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    

 

Another Cool Success Story: “We have had one version or another of Diskeeper installed on our production SAN for many years. That is what we use for our major production systems.   The Automatic defrag option for drives and disk volumes is by far the greatest feature.  The ‘Set It and Forget It’ is the best way to ensure file fragmentation is always minimal. No manual defrags are ever required and performance levels are constantly maintained at their highest levels due to having all our database files in contiguous drive space. The only time we ever end up with major file fragmentation is during our nightly backups (many hundreds of gigabytes) and Auto defrag takes care of that within a few hours.  We have a multi-node cluster using this SAN and no matter which node is owning the cluster resources, Diskeeper takes care of all shared volumes. Other then the initial install, I spend close to zero time with Diskeeper or worrying about fragmentation. I checked one of our nodes today and ran a manual analysis; there were a total of 3 fragments for 1 file out of 90,000+ on the system. That’s what Auto defrag does for us!” 

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 .

By: Mark Harrer, Systems Engineer

 

We issued a press release on an upcoming technology. Initially you'll see this new software on PCs from popular systems manufacturers. Read the early info here.

Newskeeper is a monthly/bi-monthly print magazine published by Diskeeper Corporation. We mail it out to enterprise customers quite regularly.

It contains technical info and articles that help IT professionals better understand and use our solutions.

You can read the latest version here. A highlight in this issue is an interview with the Technical Manager (George Dzieciol) for many of our products, including the eponymous Diskeeper. In it he talks about the Titan Defrag Engine, the driving technology behind the Diskeeper 2009 EnterpriseServer edition.