"Why Cornerstone Bank of York, Nebraska Choose Diskeeper To Maintain Their Computer Systems"
Complete Transcript of
Jason Amick – Cornerstone Bank
Hosts – Alan Ashendorf
Let’s Talk Computers
August 4 2007
Alan: One of the major problems that large companies face is having all their computer systems running at optimum performance. Today, we will be talking about how one bank solved this problem. Our guest, today, is Jason Amick, Network Administrator for Cornerstone Bank of York, Nebraska. Welcome to Let’s Talk Computers, Jason.
Jason: Thank you, Alan.
Alan: As an Administrator for Cornerstone Bank, you have a large number of computers to maintain. Can you give you an overall view of what type of computers you have in the bank?
Jason: The bank has about 200 users. We run a Citrix environment. Presentations are in 4.0. On the end users’ desktops we run a mixture of terminals and PC’s that are locked down and they give the users access to Citrix applications. They also provide support for a number of institutions. So our total end user-base is about 500 users.
Alan: When you are talking about the Citrix environments, each Citrix box is a server by itself, isn’t it?
Jason: Correct. Each Citrix server runs all the applications that the users need. We run a fully published desktop. When the user logs in, they see the Windows desktop, their start menu that has all the applications that that user needs to run. On our Citrix servers, we average between 30-40 users per system. And on the systems, we have about 50 applications that run everything from Microsoft Office applications, Internet Explorer, QuickBooks, to bank-specific applications.
Alan: How many servers are you talking about running Citrix?
Jason: We have 6 servers in productions in any given time.
Alan: I know running Citrix servers are completely different than running just regular stand-alone servers, but how many standalone servers do you have?
Jason: In total we have about 90 servers that we run in our environment - about 250 workstations. And then, with all of the correspondence, it’s about 500 workstations.
Alan: So you can pretty well say that this not a small operation that you have to manage day-to-day, is it?
Jason: I would be comfortable saying that – yes. Between the 90 servers and keeping track of the various applications running on those and various end-user issues that come up, as well as problems that arise on the workstations, it is a big job.
Alan: I know one of the big problems on trying do network administration, is users. Users bring their own kind of problems to every kind of situation, don’t they?
Jason: In the Citrix environment, we minimize a lot of that by limiting what users can do in the environment. They can’t install applications. They can’t make changes to the system without going through committees of processes to approve the applications and we test it in a test environment.
Alan: You mean that you don’t allow them to get into the Registry and make their own little tweaks?
Jason: No, that tends to crash the system and we don’t like that.
Alan: In talking about the different hardware that you have on your system, I imagine that there are all different brands, all different models, and all different kinds of operating systems, right?
Jason: We run a combination of Windows 2000, 2003 servers, and we’ve got IBM and Dell servers, primarily. We also have some EMC storage area networks, as well as a couple of NAS boxes.
Alan: And with all this different hardware and workstations, users will be complaining about slow-downs and this is a major problem, isn’t it?
Jason: Yeah, over the course of time, and as users run their applications and save their data – the drives become fragmented, the performance does degrade on the servers.
Alan: Of course, Windows has their own built-in program that comes with all their operating systems. Is that really the best for all these different computers?
Jason: In our environment, we found that it really didn’t work to our satisfaction. With the large server environment, there’s a lot of data being passed back and forth, and the environment needs to be available 7 days a week 24 hours a day. We just found that the Windows defragment really didn’t work for us.
Alan: With 90 some-odd servers and over 200 workstations – that had to be a nightmare to try to schedule these.
Jason: We constantly had to go through "schedule it, re-run it". And one of the biggest issues we found with the server environment is that it wouldn’t defragment files that were in use. With the Citrix, a large file server, there’s a lot sitting out there. And it just didn’t satisfy our needs.
Alan: Yes, because I know that using Citrix here for Total Solutions, that was one of the problems we ran into – is that every time that you try to do defrag, it had all sorts of locked files and it would just by-pass them. And that’s not what we needed to have them defragged.
Jason: Yes, exactly. And that’s a very big problem that we ran into. We looked at a number of products and we chose the Diskeeper Product because it gives us the ability to schedule a job, and go back through and analyze the information and see how the servers were performing and in a large environment like this. It really gave us the flexibility and management capabilities that we needed.
Alan: Well, I know you had a list of things that you were looking for when you were deciding what defrag program to go with. What were some of the main concerns that you were looking at?
Jason: Being a bank, of course, cost is always a big one. But management and performance were next two. We looked around, we looked at who the leaders were in that area and then what an application could provide in the way of management scheduling, and being about to analyze that data to make sure we were getting back what we expected.
Alan: What about things like support? I know that any time you are changing too many programs on a large network, you always want to make sure you have excellent support?
Jason: Support was a big thing. Fortunately we really haven’t had to rely on that support. Everything has worked really smoothly for us.
Alan: It’s nice to have a program that you install it and even from your standpoint, you forget about it, because it does what it does and it does what it does well!
Jason: Absolutely. Any program that does that is definitely a boon!
Alan: And speaking of management capabilities, with all of these 90 servers and over 200 workstations, Central Management had to be one of the key features that you had to look for when you were deciding what kind of defrag solution to go with?
Jason: Diskeeper has an Admin Console, which really takes a lot of that management headache away. I am able to go through one interface, see the various servers, what the status is. Really, it eases the administration.
Alan: So you can sit in front of one computer and see your whole network infrastructure and tell what needs to be defragged and what doesn’t to be defragged?
Jason: Not just what "needs to be defragged", but I can see the status of scheduled jobs and the performance of those servers over time. So I can see if there is increased fragmentation on one server, through the Admin Console I can take a look at that. So it’s not just a matter of the Application defragmenting the server. I mean, it actually gives me performance information over time.
Alan: Now, that performance information has to be vital for a CEO, because everybody says, "Well, we really don’t need to defrag. Windows takes care of that themselves". But what kind of performance gains have you seen on the workstations and especially on the servers?
Jason: We have seen a lot of improvement – we’ve got several Gateways Applications that we were running into performance and connectivity problems, due primarily to the size of the databases and the defragmentation that was occurring on those boxes. And with the course of time, by having Diskeeper on there, we have actually been about to go back and show that there’s been improvement in the performance of those boxes.
Also, on our network-attached storage, we do disk-to-disk backups and what used to take 2-3 hours for disk backups, we have actually decreased that down to one hour.
Alan: As a network administrator for a bank, you can’t take computers or servers off-line to do defragging, like we used to. We used to have a certain time period or window that says, “Okay, we’re going to do defragging from this particular time to this particular time and nobody use their computer”. You can’t do that in a bank, can you?
Jason: Absolutely not. Once again, with Diskeeper one of the big things that this has done for us is to give us the ability to run those defragmentation processes in the background - through the scheduling and the Admin Console. Yes, for some applications are really sensitive to the disk activity, and with Diskeeper you can schedule it for during times of high utilization, it doesn’t run in the background. Or for some systems like a fileserver, we can run continuously throughout the day. So, you’ve got the ability to tailor it to the individual systems.
Alan: Where, say you’re running a critical application, the dragger kinds of throttles itself back and it kind of goes into idle mode.
Jason: We’ve got a couple of database applications that don’t play well with anything else. In those cases, we have actually had to schedule the Diskeeper Application so that shuts down during the high-performance periods. But with most applications it will actually throttle back and it will give the system the resources it needs to run and then once the system is freed up, Diskeeper steps back up and it runs normally.
Alan: You mentioned earlier that you have NAS devices (Network Attached Storage Devices), and sometimes that’s very difficult to defrag because they’re like standalone devices. How do you defrag those?
Jason: We actually run Network Attached Storage that has the Windows 2003 storage server installed on it. With that, we actually install the Diskeeper Products to those boxes – run it, schedule it, and maintain it through the Admin Console.
Alan: And this is something you can basically push out to any new workstation that comes on line and the user doesn’t even need to know about it?
Jason: It’s one of the nice things about being about to push out the Product, have it installed without having to come interrupt the user and change things in their environment.
Alan: From an Admin’s standpoint, the less that a user knows about what’s going on behind the scenes, the better your job is, isn’t it?
Jason: Absolutely - the end user doesn’t care what the problem is – all they want is for everything to work the way that they want it to.
Alan: If they are surfing the Internet or they are doing any kind of database work, having a slow computer really does not make their day. And if it does not make their day, it tends not to make your day either, does it?
Jason: Oh, absolutely. I’ve got 200 bosses - so, their problems are my problems!
Alan: And from a user’s standpoint, they let you know when things go wrong, but hopefully they let you know when things go right. Do they see a performance gain when they are using their day-to-day applications, like databases, spreadsheets, or any of the programs that the banks use day-to-day?
Jason: When we first implemented Diskeeper, there were a number of applications and file sharing servers that had their performance improved on, and users did notice that. Of course now they don’t see that because Diskeeper is doing its job and the application is performing the way it’s supposed to.
Alan: Well, when you installed Diskeeper, did you see an immediate result or was this something that showed better over time?
Jason: Both – with some systems you can see an immediate result. A lot of it tracks back to what kind of fragmentation rule I connect. Some systems, we just couldn’t manage through the Microsoft Defragment, so with those systems – as soon as we installed Diskeeper, I can go back through and realize an immediate gain. Some systems, over the course of time, like with our Network Attached Storage and the disk-disk backups – those actually took a period of time before the disk fragmentation was decreased enough that we could realize the gain, and that’s really where the continual schedule, being able to run that period on an on-going basis, comes into play.
Alan: Would you recommend Diskeeper to any other company that is looking for performance gains or to prevent slow-downs?
Jason: Yes. I would highly recommend it. We’ve done that for a number of other institutions – when they ask us how we handle those types of things and Diskeeper is always something that I recommend to them.
Alan: Network Administration is an on-going thing of “ducking bullets” day-to-day and I’m glad to see that one thing you don’t have to worry about is defragging anymore. And we look forward to having you back on Let’s Talk Computers, talking about some of the other things that you run into.
Jason: I appreciate that and it’s been a pleasure.