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. 

 

Diskeeper has been one of our main implementation tools for any new Windows Server-based product. HBR Solutions has been using Diskeeper for nearly 8 years, and have found it to be a critical part of our system configurations. 　

Our clients understand the importance of highly efficient data access, and Diskeeper Corporation has always kept their promise on making sure that the drives are always set to peak performance. Whether we run the product under a NAS, SAN or DAS, Diskeeper has proved that it can manage any type of hardware design and configuration including virtual servers. 　
　
In the majority of our client's install base, Diskeeper has shown a substantial increase in performance once installed and configured on existing systems. The hardware is a mix of IBM Shark SAN, EMC, Dell (DAS and internal) and HP (internal).

As for the NAS, DAS an SAN results, our analysis pertains to clients who had the hardware in place and were looking at upgrading their hardware. However, once we installed and configured Diskeeper on those systems, we saw performance that went up to nearly 40% better on the same hardware platform.

We are very pleased with Diskeeper and will continue to the use their product on our future endeavors.

　
Steven Bond
HBR Solutions Inc
Aberdeen, NJ

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

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    

 

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?

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 .

By: Mark Harrer, Systems Engineer

 

I'm fresh back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. This is the annual pilgrimage of 9,000 partners from around the world who come to find out about the latest Microsoft technologies. Obviously, Windows 7 was a highlight. But what struck me most was the amount of time devoted to virtualization, and especially VMware. Here are a few highlights:      Per Kevin Turner (Microsoft’s COO), VMware has changed their licensing scheme. Besides being very expensive, it’s not an easy upgrade path. So Microsoft will leverage this to their advantage—especially on price point—since one can get Hyper-V for free with Server 2008.  People have said that Hyper-V is too early in as a technology to decide on its being a viable alternative to VMware. Perhaps so. But 24 pts market share were taken from VMware with version 1.0 of Hyper-V alone. And now, Microsoft has Hyper-V R2 coming out with a new Live Migration feature to compete directly with VMware's core V-motion functionality.  Good enough to make one want to switch? I don’t know. But Microsoft has put a lot of thought into this. Check out their migration path: Using Microsoft’s new System Center console, one can run BOTH Hyper-V and VMware together. Microsoft views this as their “big differentiator” since VMware can't do the same.  This means with Hyper-V you will have the ease of having both products under "one pane of glass." So you don’t in fact need to give up your VMware if you wish to try both at once. Clever. 

Microsoft referred to this as "offering significant value at a fraction of the cost" (1/6th to be exact) and they showed the side by side pricing to prove it.  I am not really here to say this is right, wrong, good or bad—we deliver products for both platforms. But it does seem to me that the customer is the one who is coming out on top on this one. So it should be an interesting battle to watch.

[Derek De Vette is the VP Channel & Public Affairs] 

 

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.

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.

A while back we undertook some interesting research projects. We built some high-tech tools to collect data about Windows behavior during the boot process. After analyzing that data, we realized we had a fantastic opportunity to dramatically improve system boot up for common Windows desktop platforms.

Techworld recently broke the story. You can read about it here.

You'll hear more about this new solution in the coming months as it hits the streets in popular laptop and desktop systems.

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.

A long time ago in a server room far, far away there was the weekend effort of IT to "backup, reformat, restore". Alternatively one could "squeeze" all the data to the front of the disk/volume after taking the volume offline and running special utlities. This was how fragmentation used to be solved. Eventually defragmentation evolved into online Manual and eventually Scheduled tasks. That lasted for years until it evolved again to Automatic and then invisible Real Time defragmentation, for which Diskeeper 2007 through 2009 stand alone. But it is time to evolve once again, stay tuned for the sequel...

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

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.

The current issue of Redmond Mag has an 18 page pullout from Microsoft about the value of their Windows Server certification program. In it is a highlight about the benefits we've seen by routinely certifying Diskeeper. Achieving certification certainly results in a better experience for customers. 

Centrify Corp, one of the other products highlighted posted the pullout as a pdf on their site. You can read it here.

I found the back page Microsoft ad amusing. Is it just me or is that a photo-chop of Marc Cuban yelling at an NBA ref?

Diskeeper has a booth at both the Microsoft Tech Ed trade show this week in Los Angeles, and the Interop show next week in Las Vegas. If you are attending, stop by and pick up a cool comic book, some software, and maybe even catch a sneak peak presentation of a brand new software product.

John Savill (formerly of NTFAQ.com) and currently of Windows IT Pro's "FAQ for Windows" just added a new topic on defragmenting Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV). As if IT doesn't have enough 3-letter acronyms already, CSV is a major feature in the upcoming 2008 Server R2 releases (aka Windows 7 Server).

CSV allows write access to a given VHD from more than just the one host node, and quite a few other enterprise-virtualization necessities. CSV is the backbone technology that allows for the new "Live Migration" feature. R2 is a major step forward to making Microsoft's virtualization solution more "enterprise-worthy", and a major step forward to supporting VDI on Hyper-V.  

Here is a link on setting up and using CSV.