"How Fragmentation Effects NAS and SAN Storage Devices and Why an Automatic Defrag Solution is a Must"

Complete Transcript of
Rick Cadruvi – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
July 26 2008

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers we are talking about NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Networks) and why automatic defragmentation is critical to keep them running at their peak performance. Our guest today is Rick Cadruvi, Senior Software Engineer with Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Rick.

Rick:  Thank you very much, Alan. It’s good to be on.

Alan:  Rick, last time we were talking about external devices like USB, FireWall, and eSATA external hard drives. All of these devices we talked about are directly attached to our own computer system. However, what about these new storage devices that are attached directly to the network? Let’s take NAS instance. How does a NAS device work?

Rick:  NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and it’s an external computer, effectively that’s put onto the network. It’ has its own network address and it adds as a file server. It will serve up the data to a local computer.

So, if I have 5 computers that want to use storage and I don’t want to have to put a lot of disk drives in each one, I can buy a NAS device. Usually they are very flexible and I can add a lot of storage to that. And then my other computers can just access that across the network.

Alan:  But that still has to be maintained. Does the computer maintain itself or is this something that we have to do "externally" to the computer?

Rick:  It is a separate computer, so it would have the same sort of maintenance as a normal computer. But, it’s usually a lightweight version. Many times they don’t have keyboards or mice or anything. They are usually managed via some kind of a network interface like a web browser or something.

But they are fairly low maintenance in terms of administrative. However, they suffer from the exact same problems as any other computer when accessing a hard drive. So it’s important that they also are defragmented. The Network Storage Device is running in that defragmenter, as well.

Alan:  Now, we’re talking about NAS devices and that’s Network Attached Storage, but a lot of small businesses have gone to what they call a "SAN" device?

Rick:  It’s always a very confusing thing. The letters are just backwards. And they are very similar. But in a SAN case, rather than being a file server, it’s serving raw blocks of data.

What a SAN device allows you to do is create individual volumes of data for a computer. So, on my personal computer if I’m attached to SAN, I can say, "I need 500 Gigabytes of data." The SAN can dynamically just go and grab that data. It has the flexibility of grabbing whatever pieces of data that it chooses to grab. As an Administrator, I don’t really care from the PC side where that data is stored. That can be done in a RAID, so that it’s very efficient in terms of striping.

The difference on that is rather than needing to defragment from SAN device as you do in a NAS situation, that requires that the local system that’s picking up that piece of storage has to have a defragmenter, there; because if it doesn’t defragment that chunk of data coming from the SAN, you will have exactly the same problems. In fact they will be slight worse because you will have to do a lot more network accesses to get a piece of data when you make the request across the network to the SAN device.

Alan:  Microsoft® just came out with their Windows® Home Server. That’s a separate computer system, but it’s not looked at as a computer system. How do we maintain that?

Rick:  It has its own interface that you can access from another computer via the network. You can maintain it remotely using a web browser. It allows you to have all of your files on that server and you can do backups there and then have your regular computers at home just access your files on the home server, itself.

So, it makes it real flexible and real easy to do your backups to keep all of your data in a single place, as opposed to having to worry about what this data is on this computer and this other data is on this other computer. You can just have a central location.

Let’s say you want to serve up some music for your iPods or you want to serve up some video that you are going to watch on your home theatre system. All of that data can be in one central location. It doesn’t really matter where in your home that you are trying to access data. It just comes from that one home server.

Alan:  When we’re trying to do something like backing up our computer system and we’re taking files from an internal device and putting them to an external device – it’s very important that both of these disk drive systems have maximum organization. Otherwise, everything can get slowed down, can’t it?

Rick:  Oh, yeah. That becomes almost a worst-case scenario. Because you end up with a lot of little pieces being gathered from one system and then sent across with a large number of packets over across the network, somewhere – and then put onto a disk. And then because it’s not well organized, there isn’t adequate free space that’s contiguous, that’s put together in a single place; it has to put all of these little pieces in lots of little places across the disk drive. Each of those accesses can involve moving the heads mechanically and that’s a very slow operation, so yeah – it can be a really terrible thing if it’s not well organized.

Alan:  I’ve seen a lot of people just before they do a backup, they are going to defrag their computer system to make it more efficient; but then it takes forever to do that. Your new Diskeeper® can maintain the files system in the background so we don’t ever have to do this massive defrag, do we?

Rick:  Yes, Diskeeper in fact is designed to all the time (as you’re using your system) to keep the file system maintained in a defragmented fashion to totally organize the file system and keep it in prime operating condition for the best speed on a continuous basis. As a result, when you want to do something like a backup, you don’t have to worry about, "Are the files collected together, so therefore the operation is fast?" It’s just done automatically, behind the scenes and in such a manner of using our InvisiTasking® technology that you don’t even notice it running while you’re using it.

Alan:  So, when we do backups they’re going to be very efficient, because they’re going to grab the backups as fast as possible, stream them out of the computer and then put it on the external drive, so that it is organized the way it should be in the first place?

Rick:  That’s exactly how it happens when you’re running Diskeeper all the time. It just automatically, magically, behind the scenes – keeps everything together. So when a backup grabs the data, it grabs a large chunk of data and then sends it out across whatever the interface is all as one chunk. And then the disk drive can just spin continuously sending the data out. It will be much more efficient.

Alan:  Also if you have anti-virus running in the background that’ll make a major impact because every time something gets written to the hard drive, the anti-virus kicks in and starts looking at it and it wants to grab a copy of it and to move it over safely so it can digest it.

Rick:  And having it one place, again, means that when the anti-virus software wants to pick it up and take a look at it, the file system doesn’t have to do hundreds of operations to do that – it can do one operation.

Alan:  People don’t realize that as you are sharing computers and sharing printers, especially, when you start printing or have a print job that’s starting that print job has to go somewhere – so it gets stored on some hard drive, somewhere and if it’s not organized, that can be scattered all over all creation, can’t it?

Rick:  On a very badly fragmented disk that has almost no large chunks of free space, when that print job gets stored in the que and gets pulled out to the disk, that’s the operation we call it "spooling it." When they send it out to the disk, the file system is perfectly happy to make it a thousand chunks, instead of one.

It’s perfectly happy just to make a bunch of little, tiny pieces if the free space is not well organized. So, as a result, when that operation happens, (that print job) that can be slowed up, too. Just because the job itself is on the disk, it's in a bunch of little tiny pieces.

Alan:  We’re starting to see consumers where they have multiple computers in a home. The average used to be one computer for each home. Now, 2-3-4 computers are the average and all of them are having to be tied together by some kind of networking system and sharing the information back and forth. Defragmentation is almost a matter of fact, nowadays, isn’t it?

Rick:  Yes, without it things become very slow and people just don’t like to wait for things. They see their computers get slower and slower and slower and they wonder why. There’s no apparent reason. Many times, that’s just because they aren’t decrementing on a regular basis. With Diskeeper and InvisiTasking Technology it just happens, automatically. You just never notice the slow-downs.

The system just continues to run well and with all of that network interface and all of the wanting to transfer my files from my computer to my son’s computer and back and forth – that just goes a lot faster, because everything is contiguous on disk. It’s all in one big chunk. And therefore, it can be sent out in large bursts, as opposed to a bunch of small, little tiny bursts.

Alan:  I’ve seen people who have actually used their computer say for 6 months and they are fed up with the performance of the computer. They go out and buy a brand new computer and the only thing that was wrong with their computer system is that files were so fragmented and scattered all over the hard drive, that every process of opening up say a database or a spreadsheet just seemed to take longer and longer. With having an automatic defragger on your system like Diskeeper 2008 with InvisiTasking, they didn’t have to out and buy a whole new computer, did they?

Rick:  No, it would have been a much cheaper solution to have put Diskeeper on the system. People start to think that because they’ve got these really big disk drives and they have got a lot of free space on their disks, they are not going to get fragmentation.

Alan:  We’re seeing standard computers with 750 Gig or Terabytes worth of hard drive space. The larger the hard drive, the worse the performance is actually going to get, because you’re having all these temporary files that are being put onto the hard drive and then being marked for deletion. Microsoft Windows looks at it and says, "Well, I don’t need to bring that file back and write on top of it. I’ll just go use this free space that’s out there in the other ball park!"

Rick:  And that free space could be now a bunch of little tiny pieces because of all those temporary files have been deleted and not necessarily in the order in which they were created. There are a lot of little tiny free spaces on the disk. The file system is perfectly happy to grab those little tiny spaces and use those for your large files, as opposed to going out and trying to find a very huge free space to put your file in.

When you’re out browsing on the Web, the web browser is constantly creating and deleting little tiny temporary files. That just totally trashes the free space. And as a result, when you create a file you really care about like a Word document or you have an MP3 song that’s on your disk or something like that, that gets scattered across the disk in a bunch of little tiny pieces. That’s why the system gets really slow because it takes a lot of resources and a lot of time to collect those pieces. And if they just put on Diskeeper the system would run fast and they wouldn’t even realize that it was running in the background.

InvisiTasking does such a good job of keeping it from taking resources when the user is using resources. But the user can’t even tell that Diskeeper is running in the background. It takes almost no resources and it keeps the disk running at prime condition. And as a result, they don’t end up thinking they should just throw away their computer and start again.

Alan:  Let’s say I wanted to try Diskeeper and see what the performance is? Can I get a trial copy from your website?

Rick:  We do have a free trialware from the website. It is a full version. We don’t limit anything that [for example] says, "Will defragment 10 files," and then that’s as good as it gets or "We’ll defragment for 30 minutes," and that’s as good as it gets.

No, it’s a full Trialware for the period of time. I believe it is 30 days. It does it and you can see how well it works. If you like it; if it does a good job for you, you can buy it and you can continue getting great performance well into the future.

Alan:  I know you have a number of white papers on your website that actually explain Defragmentation and what it does?

Rick:  We do, we have lot of different white papers that talk about all kinds of technical aspects of disk performance and the integrity of the system and all of the benefits that you get from it. Right on the home page, there’s a button that you can click for White Papers. We have streaming videos that you can get. There’s a whole bunch of different white papers on defragmentation; on automating system performance and reliability; doing transparent defragmentation; what the impacts of disk fragmentation are. There’s quite a bit of resources.

Alan:  Rick, I want to thank you for being our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers, showing us how we can maintain our computer system for peak performance. We look forward to having you on the air again real soon.

Rick:  Thank you very much, Alan. It’s been a pleasure to be with you.