Diskeeper 2010 RTM'ed (Release To Manufacturing) earlier this week, so we celebrated with cake; a Diskeper cake in the image of the new DVD case that is. 

If you are a Diskeeper Maintenance customer, keep an eye open for an email from Diskeeper Corporation with some exciting news. Emails are going out this week through next.

Our developers are currently working on updating Undelete 2009 to support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2. We expect the update to be available in early-to-mid December 2009. If no major changes are required, it should release in the early part of that month. If we discover a need to make more significant changes to Undelete, we'll run a field test, and release sometime later that month.

I run Server 2008r2 as my main production system and have been running early versions of Undelete for several months - without experiencing any major issues. So, I'm optimistic we'll get this update out soon. 

Almost here

Computerworld just printed an article about our current and future HyperBoot releases. It includes a simple video we created. The video shows two identical brand new laptops with no changes, other than adding HyperBoot to one of them. They've been set, in a loop, to continually reboot - right after completing a startup. The video begins in "real time" and then fast forwards to show the continuing improvements.

Read the article and check out the video here.

PS: we have heard significant interest from corporations and home users alike for this product, and are increasing our efforts to make it available publicly.

Optimizing the disks of virtual platforms is an absolute must for performance. Typically even more so than on physical platforms.

Topix Technologies, an IT Analyst group out of Paris, France recent completed a study about the effects of fragmentation on the modern virtual infrastructure. They used V-locity to restore performance to the high service levels IT departments and providers are required to deliver. Check out the performance results in the chart below or read the full report here.

We're looking for some current Diskeeper customers that are interested in getting a first look at a new technology breakthrough - in Diskeeper 2010. The beta test will start next week, and we have about 50 openings left that we need to fill.

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.

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

That said, the next major release of Diskeeper (coming soon) will also take advantage of new functionality in Windows 7. Windows 7 allows for additional online metadata defrag, including $Extend  (think USN Journal here) and also $Secure.

This past year, we've also been engaged with Microsoft's Front Runner compatibility program. Microsoft  is going to great lengths to ensure the upgrade process (e.g. install Windows 7 upgrade over Vista) is seamless for their customers. Something I did not see with the Vista release, is the degree of involvement they have required from software vendors such as us, to ensure reliability and stability for users who take the upgrade path.

On to Undelete...

Undelete 2009 will support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2 around the time that those new OS'es release to public (i.e. Oct 22nd). We'll post/email instructions for Undelete 2009 customers regarding how to get the new update when the software is available. All in all, supporting Windows 7 has not required significant code changes, but there's a great deal of quality control testing we always require before we can certify our software for release. 

As part of that testing process, a few weeks ago several of our senior developers were at Microsoft's bi-annual IFS PlugFest. PlugFest is a meeting of file system filter driver developers that we've been regularly attending for years. At this interoperability forum, we can test our solutions alongside those from other manufacturers. The perfect timing of this event allowed us to test the updated Undelete on the new Windows platforms with file system filter drivers from other vendors. We also had the opportunity to test some new, very advanced (but as yet unreleased) new technologies!

While the ongoing LA area fire is not a threat to the Diskeeper Corporation building, many of our employees live in the areas where the fire is a concern.

Here are a few pics taken this past weekend from the backyard of an employee who lives in the foothills of Angeles Crest:

Needless to say, he's incredibly grateful for the efforts of the firefighters saving thousands of homes in that area.

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.

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).

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...

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

The next evolutionary step for defragmenters is coming.

As a filter driver, Undelete captures everything (except those files/file types explicitly excluded). One of the advanced features of Undelete is the ability to organize previous versions of Microsoft office files into a common recovery location and remove all the wacky characters (~$, .wrl, etc...) normally associated with temp and older iterations of these files. This feature, called "versioning", supports a very intuitive method to easily locate, preview, and recover these previous versions (ex. Microsoft Word document, Excel Spreadsheet, etc.) which may have been overwritten. The feature is nicely integrated with Windows Explorer so you can easily right-click a file and select to view the versions.

We heavily test and officially support the predefined files listed: .doc, .docx, .dot, .htm, .html, .mht, .mhtml, .pot, .pps, .ppt, .pptx, .rft, .txt, .xls, .xlt, .xml; however a user may want to turn on this feature for another file type other than the default provided types. The data below will show you how to add other types, by file extensions. Please note this is a use-at-your-own-risk trick, and involves editing the Windows registry. And, also note that this workaround may not work correctly for all applications due to the manner in which some applications save their files.

For example, you may work at a design company and use AutoCAD and would like to turn on versioning for your CAD files. AutoCAD saves files with an extension of .dwg.

Again, to perform this workaround, you will need to edit the registry. Please note that an incorrect entry in the registry could damage your operating system and make your computer so it will not boot. Follow the instructions below to perform this workaround. 

To start regedit, select Start – Run and enter: regedit               

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Diskeeper Corporation\Undelete\FRBin and edit the VersioningExtension key to add the file type which you want to use versioning on. Following is a screen capture of the registry key.   

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Diskeeper Corporation\Undelete\FRBin and edit the VersioningExtension key to add your file extension followed by OK.  (For the AutoCAD example, you would add .dwg which is entered above.) Once this is complete, exit regedit and restart your computer for the changes you entered to take affect.

The new virtual platform disk optimizer for Hyper-V platforms is now available for sale and as trialware.

V-locity with InvisiTasking technology installs on both the Windows Server 2008 OS that is running the virtual host and all Windows virtual machines (guests). Each component optimizes its respective Windows OS and performs defragmentation of files and consolidation of free space. This minimizes unnecessary I/O passed from the OS to the disk subsystem and aligns data on the drives for optimal access.

With the proprietary InvisiTasking, V-locity will automatically and invisibly defragment files and consolidate free space on every Windows system it is installed, eliminating unnecessary and excess I/O to restore system performance and reliability for the entire platform. At the same time, V-locity provides a tool to analyze and compact wasted virtual disk space (dynamic disks).

In accordance with most virtualization software products, pricing for V-locity is "per CPU-core" (similar to the traditional per-socket) rather than per operating system. This provides users a fixed cost for their optimization solutions, and makes licensing much easier and more predictable as they 'grow' those platforms.

Get more info about V-locity here.

Future versions are already in the works, including support for VMware's enterprise solutions.