"Tips and Tricks to Get The Most Performance
From Your Computer System" Part 7
How Corporations can save Time and Money

Complete Transcript of
Jeremy Buck - Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
February 28 2009

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers, we are continuing our series on “Tips and Tricks on How to Get the Most Performance from your Computer System.” Today we will be focusing on the corporatations and how they can save both time and money. Our guest today is Jeremy Buck, Spokesperson from Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Jeremy.

Jeremy:  Thanks for having me, Alan.

Alan:  Well, Jeremy, we have been talking about desktops and laptops and how they affect consumers; but what about corporations? It seems that corporate computer systems just have to be babied. They have to be at peak performance all the time. In a home environment, if a computer is having trouble we can always get around to it later. However, in a corporate environment, there is no "later." There is only "now," isn’t there?

Jeremy:  It’s interesting in that we have gotten into a day and age where computers have helped to advance to where operations are done so fast that lost time is sort of exacerbated. Let’s say that a filing operation that might take four to five minutes in the old days of just filing cabinets might have a buffer of a minute or two.

However, in a computer environment, you expect that operation to happen within four to five seconds and any slowdown on an operation like that not only makes it feel like you are losing all that time, but you are actually losing all that time and time is money. You lose a few seconds or a few minutes on this operation; you lose a half an hour on a backup or a half hour on an anti-virus time — that amount of time all accumulates and it is lost production time.

Alan:  It used to be in an office environment that somebody came into the office in the morning; turned the light on at 8:00 a.m. and the first thing they did was they took out the backup tape and they stored it. Then they started doing their day-to-day work. At 5:00 in the afternoon they put a new backup tape in the machine because they knew at 6:00 it was going to start its defrag and then about 8:00 p.m. it would start doing its backup. We are no longer in that world anymore, are we?

Jeremy:  No, no. Things adjust on the fly and it's hard to predict sometimes what a machine might be dedicated to. It is interesting in that in the past, just like you said, you would set so many operations by the clock. It was common place then for everybody knows that this server backs up at 7:00 p.m. It was common place for somebody to come and start working on some late night operation that was then impacting the backup or a system administrator needed to abort that backup or abort a defrag operation.

One of the nice things about Diskeeper is that we adjust to the machine on-the-fly. You don’t have to schedule your defrags at least with Diskeeper to occur on any sort of a clock basis. What we will do is we will simply adjust to the machine and defrag at the most opportune time.

What is nice about that is you can still schedule your backups; you can still say, "I want the machine to do bla-de-bla at 7:00 p.m.", but as far as Diskeeper is concerned, we don’t necessarily need to know the time that we can or cannot operate. We will decide that the machine goes into a heavy operation and we need to get out of the way and let that operation complete, and once it is complete, we will see if it is safe to come back in and defrag as much as we can. But, having that sort of a defrag on-the-fly and having it occur as the machine progresses, you are getting that high level of performance out of the machine by the minute.

Alan:  Because nowadays, especially with ecommerce, where you have servers that are being hit from all over the world, there is no "This is daytime," or "This is nighttime." It is daytime somewhere in the world and people are up and using the server!

Jeremy:  That’s right. It’s becoming kind of an interesting proposition in that we are not getting any extra hours on the clock. No matter where you go in the world, it is twenty-four hours in a day. So, how much can you fit within those twenty-four hours? And that’s becoming the interesting proposition. What can you squeeze into every single minute that goes by?

We are getting to a point where in the 1940’s everything was gauged by "In how many weeks could something be done," and as time advanced it was "how many days?" and "how many hours?" We are now in a day and age where it’s "how many minutes does it take to complete some operations?" Those are the concepts that we tend to think in. Every minute that can be saved is a valuable minute. Having operations, whether it is operations with your computer recording information or providing you with information, minutes are valuable.

Going back to the person that travels with a notebook – I think several people have been in the position where you start your presentation; you open up your notebook and you are chatting with the guys that you are about to sell this big deal to, when you open up this presentation and it should come up, instantly. But, now they are sitting and waiting and watching this hour glass while it takes two minutes for that presentation to come up, your presentation is taking a hit because now they are sitting and twiddling their thumbs!

Alan:  We live in a world of instant gratification. I’ve got a daughter, so I hear this every single day — "I want it now!" and "How can I get it delivered to me the same day?" This is a world that we are in; you can’t wait for something to happen tomorrow.

Just take for instance; you have a problem on one of your servers. Restoring a whole day’s work is not an option, anymore. Because if you did your backup at say 5:00 and it is now 4:00 the next day, restoring from a backup tape that was a day old will put you out of business, won’t it?

Jeremy:  That’s right. You also can key the ripple effect of something like this when you are cutting the checks. When you are cutting the checks for every hour that goes by that an employee is supposed to produce for you — anything that is then negatively impacting their production is lost money.

A minute or two here and there may not seem to make that much of a difference, but if you have five employees if you can sum up for every one employee that they lose a half an hour’s time in a day and then you multiply that by five employees and then you multiply that by five days in a week; suddenly you are looking at a good chunk of change — things that you have lost; sales that could have been made or transactions that could have been processed.

Like you said, we live in a day and age where it is instant gratification. If a customer in turn, has to wait an extra day to receive a package that they have bought from you; if they can’t access your website in a timely manner they will go somewhere else.

Alan:  I mean, it is not just the customer that is having the problem. Well, let’s just take a normal day of an employee’s time. They get to work and the first thing they have to do is they have to check their email to see if somebody emailed them something from the time they left the house to the time they got to work. Then they have to basically check to see what the stock market is doing. Then they have to go onto YouTube to see if there is something up there that I really can’t possibly miss — and in this day and season they want to check to what the political things are going on. This is before they do any actual work for the corporation, but if any of that starts slowing down, they are not going to say, "Well, okay, I can’t do this. I will go back to do my work." They are going to wait till it gets completed before they even do the day’s work!

Jeremy:  That’s right. That’s right. Those few extra minutes can turn into just an awful amount of time in the long run.

Alan:  I call it the "bruised knee syndrome." If you sit here and take a pen and tap on your knee once every two or three minutes or whatever it’s no big thing — but if you are sitting there and constantly tapping on it and tapping on it, there is a point where that thing starts hurting!

If employees start seeing their work become slower and slower, they are going to just sit back and say, "Well, coffee it’s break time." They will use it as an excuse. Customers, on the other hand, will go to a site and if it gets slower and slower, they don’t even need an excuse. They go elsewhere!

Jeremy:  There are few businesses anymore that don't have direct and sizeable competitors. They are few products that are sold or exchanged in the world, today that don’t have competitors. Whatever you can use to put yourself in the forefront — whether it is instant service is going to help you corner that side of the market. For anybody that was around for the Betamax-VHS wars — who knew who was going to come out on top? In the end, I think it had to do more with the cost justification of VHS.

In a battle like that anything that will give you an edge in this day and age — time is money and people expect to get things — fast. They expect to get them now. As an example I will just give you a story.

I went to a website looking for a costume for my son. I found that the prices and the speed at which I would get the costume delivered were just unbearable. I couldn’t naturally get in time for what he needed to do. I then went to the very next website and they offered faster service; the browsing was faster; they could get the product delivered faster. Time saved is exactly what got me to buy it. It was not the price, because the first site was actually less expensive. So, I was willing to spend the money, given the time that was saved.

Alan:  I can’t really see for the life of me why any corporate executive makes the decision, "Let’s see, I’m going to allow this condition to go on with my computers so that every single day it gets slower and slower and I have more downtime with my employees that I am paying good money for them to just sit and do nothing."

That is just mind-boggling when they can go out and they can put a product like Diskeeper on every computer they have and every server they have and it saves money — it doesn’t cost money!

Jeremy:  Well, you can apply it to every desktop; you can apply it to every server. There is not an environment that is running a Windows Operating System that wouldn’t benefit from Diskeeper. It doesn’t matter if you are applying it to a high-end desktop; a home machine; even in virtual environments.

You will experience the same types of slowdowns. You expound the problem by not only the employees who are doing the gritty tasks, but also the administrators who are working with servers. Those servers are then parsing out information to the people who are down in the trenches. Everything slowed down by fragmentation and everything will be sped up and brought back to where it started with a program like Diskeeper.

Alan:  We talked about the savings in cost on hard drives for desktops, because you are not using the hard drive as much, but in a server environment, I mean we are not talking about cheap drives, anymore.

The least that we can access the hard drives and do the same amount of work, the longer these hard drives are going to last — and they can cost a lot of money!

Jeremy:  Yes, you could usually extend the life of a drive by upwards to two to three years, just by having it defragmented.

Alan:  And you are just talking about one hard drive, but most corporations use what they call RAID and they may have three to five drives that are all doing the same, exact process, because of the redundancy factor. Being able to not overtax those three to five drives is a substantial amount of savings.

Jeremy:  I think by most recent projections I have heard that a gigabyte is about 40 cents, these days. If you round it up to 50 cents and say a one-terabyte drive is say, $500.

Alan:  You are talking about servers and servers are using like the SAS drives, which is a serial attached SCSI drives. These are high-quality, high-performance drives and they are not cheap!

Jeremy:  No, they are certainly not. For the person who is cutting the checks; for the person who works in the assets department where they actually maintain the dollar figures for all of the equipment that is out in the company who can tell you — "Any area that can help them to cut corners; any area that can help extend the life of something is money back into the pocket." It is money back into the savings of company; it’s less wasted time. Overall, there is just a great benefit.

Alan:  Well, what are we looking at as far as the cost of Diskeeper for our desktop or Diskeeper for our laptop and even Diskeeper for the corporation?

Jeremy:  For a small business or a home user environment, you can actually go to our website at www.diskeeper.com and we do have full pricing there for several editions. For instance, we carry a Home Edition; a Professional Edition, which would be equivalent to workstation servers, as well. For a Home Edition you are looking at roughly $30 per copy. For a desktop or a Professional Edition, it is $60 a copy. Servers are running generally about $200 a copy. We do also deal with several large environments so we tend to do volume breaks and if anybody is listening to this and deals with resellers, we do also work with resellers such as CDW and Soft Choice.

Alan:  And Jeremy, can we get a trial copy of your software to try out and see how it works and see how it saves us time and money?

Jeremy:  Absolutely. We have full versions on our website that are good for 30 days. I do repeat that they are full versions, so you will get every benefit from trying them out.

Alan:  Well, Jeremy, we are out of time and we are going to have to pick up this conversation, talking about how corporations can save time and money by keeping their computer systems working at its peak performance, next time.

Jeremy:  Thank you so much for having me.